Semantic interoperability of conceptual data modelling languages: FaCIL

Software systems aren’t getting any less complex to design, implement, and maintain, which applies to both the numerous diverse components and the myriad of people involved in the development processes. Even a straightforward configuration of a data­base back-end and an object-oriented front-end tool requires coordination among database analysts, programmers, HCI people, and increasing involvement of domain experts and stakeholders. They each may prefer, and have different competencies in, certain specific design mechanisms; e.g., one may want EER for the database design, UML diagrams for the front-end app, and perhaps structured natural language sentences with SBVR or ORM for expressing the business rules. This requires multi-modal modelling in a plurality of paradigms. This would then need to be supported by hybrid tools that offer interoperability among those modelling languages, since such heterogeneity won’t go away any time soon, or ever.

Example of possible interactions between the various developers of a software system and the models they may be using.

It is far from trivial to have these people work together whilst maintaining their preferred view of a unified system’s design, let alone doing all this design in one system. In fact, there’s no such tool that can seamlessly render such varied models across multiple modelling languages whilst preserving the semantics. At best, there’s either only theory that aims to do that, or only a subset of the respective languages’ features, or a subset of the required combinations. Well, more precisely, until our efforts. We set out to fill this gap in functionality, both in a theoretically sound way and implemented as proof-of-concept to demonstrate its feasibility. The latest progress was recently published in the paper entitled A framework for interoperability with hybrid tools in the Journal of Intelligent Information Systems [1], in collaboration with Germán Braun and Pablo Fillottrani.

First, we propose the Framework for semantiC Interoperability of conceptual data modelling Languages, FaCIL, which serves as the core orchestration mechanism for hybrid modelling tools with relations between components and a workflow that uses them. At its centre, it has a metamodel that is used for the interchange between the various conceptual models represented in different languages and it has sets of rules to and from the metamodel (and at the metamodel level) to ensure the semantics is preserved when transforming a model in one language into a model in a different language and such that edits to one model automatically propagate correctly to the model in another language. In addition, thanks to the metamodel-based approach, logic-based reconstructions of the modelling languages also have become easier to manage, and so a path to automated reasoning is integrated in FaCIL as well.

This generic multi-modal modelling interoperability framework FaCIL was instantiated with a metamodel for UML Class Diagrams, EER, and ORM2 interoperability specifically [2] (introduced in 2015), called the KF metamodel [3] with its relevant rules (initial and implemented ones), an English controlled natural language, and a logic-based reconstruction into a fragment of OWL (orchestration graphically from the paper). This enables a range of different user interactions in the modelling process, of which an example of a possible workflow is shown in the following figure.

A sample workflow in the hybrid setting, showing interactions between visual conceptual data models (i.e., in their diagram version) and in their (pseudo-)natural language versions, with updates propagating to the others automatically. At the start (top), there’s a visual model in one’s preferred language from which a KF runtime model is generated. From there, it can go in various directions: verbalise, convert, or modify it. If the latter, then the KF runtime model is also updated and the changes are propagated to the other versions of the model, as often as needed. The elements in yellow/green/blue are thanks to FaCIL and the white ones are the usual tasks in the traditional one-off one-language modelling setting.

These theoretical foundations were implemented in the web-based crowd 2.0 tool (with source code). crowd 2.0 is the first hybrid tool of its kind, tying together all the pieces such that now, instead of partial or full manual model management of transformations and updates in multiple disparate tools, these tasks can be carried out automatically in one application and therewith also allow diverse developers and stakeholders to work from a shared single system.

We also describe a use case scenario for it – on Covid-19, as pretty much all of the work for this paper was done during the worse-than-today’s stage of the pandemic – that has lots of screenshots from the tool in action, both in the paper (starting here, with details halfway in this section) and more online.

Besides evaluating the framework with an instantiation, a proof-of-concept implementation of that instantiation, and a use case, it was also assessed against the reference framework for conceptual data modelling of Delcambre and co-authors [4] and shown to meet those requirements. Finally, crowd 2.0’s features were assessed against five relevant tools, considering the key requirements for hybrid tools, and shown to compare favourable against them (see Table 2 in the paper).

Distinct advantages can be summed up as follows, from those 26 pages of the paper, where the, in my opinion, most useful ones are underlined here, and the most promising ones to solve another set of related problems with conceptual data modelling (in one fell swoop!) in italics:

• One system for related tasks, including visual and text-based modelling in multiple modelling languages, automated transformations and update propagation between the models, as well as verification of the model on coherence and consistency.
• Any visual and text-based conceptual model interaction with the logic has to be maintained only in one place rather than for each conceptual modelling and controlled natural language separately;
• A controlled natural language can be specified on the KF metamodel elements so that it then can be applied throughout the models regardless the visual language and therewith eliminating duplicate work of re-specifications for each modelling language and fragment thereof;
• Any further model management, especially in the case of large models, such as abstraction and modularisation, can be specified either on the logic or on the KF metamodel in one place and propagate to other models accordingly, rather than re-inventing or reworking the algorithms for each language over and over again;
• The modular design of the framework allows for extensions of each component, including more variants of visual languages, more controlled languages in your natural language of choice, or different logic-based reconstructions.

Of course, more can be done to make it even better, but it is a milestone of sorts: research into the  theoretical foundations of this particular line or research had commenced 10 years ago with the DST/MINCyT-funded bi-lateral project on ontology-driven unification of conceptual data modelling languages. Back then, we fantasised that, with more theory, we might get something like this sometime in the future. And we did.

References

[1] Germán Braun, Pablo Fillottrani, and C Maria Keet. A framework for interoperability with hybrid tools. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, in print since 29 July 2022.

[2] Keet, C. M., & Fillottrani, P. R. (2015). An ontology-driven unifying metamodel of UML Class Diagrams, EER, and ORM2. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 98, 30–53.

[3] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M. KF metamodel formalization. Technical Report, Arxiv.org http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6545. Dec 19, 2014. 26p.

[4] Delcambre, L. M. L., Liddle, S. W., Pastor, O., & Storey, V. C. (2018). A reference framework for conceptual modeling. In: 37th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’18). LNCS. Springer, vol. 11157, 27–42.

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The ontological commitments embedded in a representation language

Just like programming language preferences generate heated debates, this happens every now and then with languages to represent ontologies as well. Passionate dislikes for description logics or limitations of OWL are not unheard of, in favour of, say, Common Logic for more expressiveness and a different notation style, or of OBO because of its graph-based fundamentals, or that abuse of UML Class Diagram syntax  won’t do as approximation of an OWL file. But what is really going on here? Are they practically all just the same anyway and modellers merely stick with, and defend, what they know? If you could design your pet language, what would it look like?

The short answer is: they are not all the same and interchangeable. There are actually ontological commitments baked into the language, even though in most cases this is not explicitly stated as such. The ‘things’ one has in the language indicate what the fundamental building blocks are in the world (also called “epistemological primitives” [1]) and therewith assume some philosophical stance. For instance, a crisp vs vague world (say, plain OWL or a fuzzy variant thereof) or whether parthood is such a special relation that it deserves its own primitive next to class subsumption (alike UML’s aggregation). Or maybe you want one type of class for things indicated with count nouns and another type of element for stuffs (substances generally denoted with mass nouns). This then raises the question as to what the sort of commitments are that are embedded in, or can go into, a language specification and that have an underlying philosophical point of view. This, in turn, raises the question about which philosophical stances actually can have a knock-on effect on the specification or selection of an ontology language.

My collaborator, Pablo Fillottrani, and I tried to answer these questions in the paper entitled An Analysis of Commitments in Ontology Language Design that was published late last year as part of the proceedings of the 11th Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems 2020 that was supposed to have been held in September 2020 in Bolzano, Italy. In the paper, we identified and analysed ontological commitments that are, or could have been, embedded in logics, and we showed how they have been taken for well-known languages for representing ontologies and similar artefacts, such as OBO, SKOS, OWL 2DL, DLRifd, and FOL. We organised them in four main categories: what the very fundamental furniture is (e.g., including roles or not, time), acknowledging refinements thereof (e.g., types of relations, types of classes), the logic’s interaction with natural language, and crisp vs various vagueness options. They are discussed over about 1/3 of the paper.

Obviously, engineering considerations can interfere in the design of the logic as well. They concern issues such as how the syntax should look like and whether scalability is an issue, but this is not the focus of the paper.

We did spend some time contextualising the language specification in an overall systematic engineering process of language design, which is summarised in the figure below (the paper focuses on the highlighted step).

(source: [2])

While such a process can be used for the design of a new logic, it also can be used for post hoc reconstructions of past design processes of extant logics and conceptual data modelling languages, and for choosing which one you want to use. At present, the documentation of the vast majority of published languages do not describe much of the ‘softer’ design rationales, though.  

We played with the design process to illustrate how it can work out, availing also of our requirements catalogue for ontology languages and we analysed several popular ontology languages on their commitments, which can be summed up as in the table shown below, also taken from the paper:

(source: [2])

In a roundabout way, it also suggests some explanations as to why some of those transformation algorithms aren’t always working well; e.g., any UML-to-OWL or OBO-to-OWL transformation algorithm is trying to shoe-horn one ontological commitment into another, and that can only be approximated, at best. Things have to be dropped (e.g., roles, due to standard view vs positionalism) or cannot be enforced (e.g., labels, due to natural language layer vs embedding of it in the logic), and that’ll cause some hick-ups here and there. Now you know why, and that won’t ever work well.

Hopefully, all this will feed into a way to help choosing a suitable language for the ontology one may want to develop, or assist with understanding better the language that you may be using, or perhaps gain new ideas for designing a new ontology language.

References

[1] Brachman R, Schmolze J. An overview of the KL-ONE Knowledge Representation System. Cognitive Science. 1985, 9:171–216.

[2] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M. An Analysis of Commitments in Ontology Language Design. Proc. of FOIS 2020. Brodaric, B. and Neuhaus, F. (Eds.). IOS Press. FAIA vol. 330, 46-60.

Digital Assistants and AMAs with configurable ethical theories

About a year ago, there was a bit of furore in the newspapers on digital assistants, like Amazon Echo’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, or Microsoft’s Cortana, in a smart home to possibly snitch on you if you’re the marijuana-smoking family member [1,2]. This may be relevant if you live in a conservative state or country, where it is still illegal to do so. Behind it is a multi-agent system that would do some argumentation among the stakeholders (the kids, the parents, and the police). That example sure did get the students’ attention in the computer ethics class I taught last year. It did so too with an undergraduate student—double majoring in compsci and philosophy—who opted to do the independent research module. Instead of the multiple actor scenario, however, we considered it may be useful to equip such a digital assistant, or an artificial moral agent (AMA) more broadly, with multiple moral theories, so that a user would be able to select their preferred theory and let the AMA make the appropriate decision for her on whichever dilemma comes up. This seems preferable over an at-most-one-theory AMA.

(image from robotise; https://robotise.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/robot-ethics-3.jpg)

For instance, there’s the “Mia the alcoholic” moral dilemma [3]: Mia is disabled and has a new model of the carebot that can fetch her alcoholic drinks in the comfort of her home. At some point, she’s getting drunk but still orders the carebot to bring her one more tasty cocktail. Should the carebot comply? The answer depends on one’s ethical viewpoint. If you had answered with ‘yes’, you probably would not want to buy a carebot that would refuse to serve you, and likewise vv. But how to make the AMA culturally and ethically more flexible to be able to adjust to the user’s moral preferences?

The first step in that direction has now been made by that (undergrad) research student, George Rautenbach, which I supervised. The first component is a three-layered approach, with at the top layer a ‘general ethical theory’ model (called Genet) that is expressive enough to be able to model a specific ethical theory, such as utilitarianism, ethical egoism, or Divine Command Theory. This was done for those three and Kantianism, so as to have a few differences in consequence-based or not, the possible ‘patients’ of the action, sort of principles, possible thresholds and such. These reside in the middle layer. Then there’s Mia’s egoism, the parent’s Kantian viewpoint about the marijuana, a train company’s utilitarianism to sort out the trolley problem, and so on at the bottom layer, which are instantiations of the respective specific ethical theories in the middle layer.

The Genet model was evaluated by demonstrating that those four theories can be modelled with Genet and the individual theories were evaluated with a few use cases to show that the attributes stored are relevant and sufficient for those reasoning scenarios for the individuals. For instance, eventually, Mia’s egoism wouldn’t get her another drink fetched by the carebot, but as a Kantian, she would have been served.

The details are described in the technical report “Toward Equipping Artificial Moral Agents with multiple ethical theories” [4] and the models are also available for download as XML files and an OWL file. To get all this to work in a device, there’s still the actual reasoning component to implement (a few architectures exist for that) and for a user to figure out which theory they actually subscribe to so as to have the device configured accordingly. And of course, there is a range of ethical issues with digital assistants and AMAs, but that’s a topic perhaps better suited for the SIPP (FKA computer ethics) module in our compsci programme [5] and other departments.

 

p.s.: a genet is also an agile cat-like animal mostly living in Africa, just in case you were wondering about the abbreviation of the model.

 

References

[1] Swain, F. AIs could debate whether a smart assistant should snitch on you. New Scientist, 22 February 2019. Online: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2194613-ais-could-debatewhether-a-smart-assistant-should-snitch-on-you/ (last accessed: 5 March 2020).

[2] Liao, B., Slavkovik, M., van der Torre, L. Building Jiminy Cricket: An Architecture for Moral Agreements Among Stakeholders. ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society 2019, Hawaii, USA. Preprint: arXiv:1812.04741v2, 7 March 2019.

[3] Millar, J. An ethics evaluation tool for automating ethical decision-making in robotsand self-driving cars. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 30(8):787–809, 2016.

[4] Rautenbach, G., Keet, C.M. Toward equipping Artificial Moral Agents with multiple ethical theories. University of Cape Town. arxiv:2003.00935, 2 March 2020.

[5] Computer Science Department. Social Issues and Professional Practice in IT & Computing. Lecture Notes. 6 December 2019.

Logic, diagrams, or natural language for representing temporal constraints in conceptual modeling languages?

Spoiler alert of the answer: it depends. In this post, I’ll trace it back to how we got to that conclusion and refine it to what it depends on.

There are several conceptual modelling languages with extensions for temporal constraints that then will be used in a database to ensure data integrity with respect to the business rules. For instance, there may be a rule for some information system that states that “all managers in a company must have been employees of that company already” or “all postgraduate students must also be a teaching assistant for some time during their studies”. The question then becomes how to get the modellers to model this sort of information in the best way. The first step in that direction is figuring out the best way to represent temporal constraints. We already know that icons aren’t that unambiguous and easy [1], which leaves the natural language rendering devised recently [2], or one of the logic-based notations, such as the temporal Description Logic DLR_US [3]. So, the questions to investigate thus became, more precisely:

• Which representation is preferred for representing temporal information: formal semantics, Description Logics (DL), a coding-style notation, diagrams, or template-based (pseudo-)natural language sentences?
• What would be easier to understand by modellers: a succinct logic-based notation, a graphical notation, or a ‘coding style’ notation?

To answer these questions, my collaborator, Sonia Berman (also at UCT) and I conducted a survey to find out modeller preference(s) and understanding of these representation modes. The outcome of the experiment is about to be presented at the 36th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’17) that will be held next week in Valencia, Spain, and is described in more detail in the paper “Determining the preferred representation of temporal constraints in conceptual models” [4].

The survey consisted mainly of questions asking them about which representation they preferred, a few questions on trying to model it, and basic questions, like whether they had English as first language (see the questionnaire for details). Below is one of the questions to illustrate it.

One of the questions of the survey

Its option (a) is the semantics notation of the DLR_US Description Logic, its option (b) the short-hand notation in DLR_US, option (c) a coding-style notation we made up, and option (e) is the natural language rendering that came out of prior work [2]. Option (d) was devised for this experiment: it shows the constraint in the Temporal information Representation in Entity-Relationship Diagrams (TREND) language. TREND is an updated and extended version of ER_VT [5], taking into account earlier published extensions for temporal relationships, temporal attributes, and quantitative constraints (e.g., ‘employee receives a bonus after two years’), a new extension for the distinction between optional and mandatory temporal constraints, and the notation preferences emanating from [1].

Here are some of the main quantitative results:

The top-rated representation modes and `dislike’ ratings.

These are aggregates, though, and they hide some variations in responses. For instance, representing ‘simple’ temporal constraints in the DL notation was still ok (though noting that diagrams were most preferred), but the more complex the constraints got, the more the preference for the natural language rendering. For instance, take “Person married-to Person may be followed by Person divorced-from Person, ending Person married-to Person.” is deemed easier to understand than or . Yet, the temporal relationship was deemed easier to understand than “The objects participating in a fact in Person married to Person do not relate through married-to at some time”. Details of the experiment and more data and analysis are described in the paper [4]. In sum, the evaluation showed the following:

1. a clear preference for graphical or verbalised temporal constraints over the other three representations;
2. ‘simple’ temporal constraints were preferred graphically and complex temporal constraints preferred in natural language; and
3. their English specification of temporal constraints was inadequate.

Overall, this indicates that what is needed is some modeling tool that has a multi-modal interface for temporal conceptual model development, with the ability to switch between graphical and verbalised temporal constraints in particular.

If I hadn’t had teaching obligations (which now got cancelled due to student protests anyway) and no NRF funding cut in the incentive funding (rated researchers got to hear from one day to the next that it’ll be only 10% of what it used to be), I’d have presented the paper myself at ER’17. Instead, my co-author is on her way to all the fun. If you have any questions, suggestions, or comments, you can ask her at the conference, or drop me a line via email or in the comments below. If you’re interested in TREND: we’re working on a full paper with all the details and have conducted further modeling experiments with it, which we hope to finalise writing up by the end of the year (provided student protests won’t escalate and derail research plans any further).

 

References

[1] T. Shunmugam. Adoption of a visual model for temporal database representation. M. IT thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 2016.

[2] Keet, C.M. Natural language template selection for temporal constraints. CREOL: Contextual Representation of Events and Objects in Language, Joint Ontology Workshops 2017, 21-23 September 2017, Bolzano, Italy. CEUR-WS Vol. (in print).

[3] A. Artale, E. Franconi, F. Wolter, and M. Zakharyaschev. A temporal description logic for reasoning about conceptual schemas and queries. In S. Flesca, S. Greco, N. Leone, and G. Ianni, editors, Proceedings of the 8th Joint European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence (JELIA-02), volume 2424 of LNAI, pages 98-110. Springer Verlag, 2002.

[4] Keet, C.M., Berman, S. Determining the preferred representation of temporal constraints in conceptual models. 36th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’17). Mayr, H.C., Guizzardi, G., Ma, H. Pastor. O. (Eds.). Springer LNCS vol. 10650, 437-450. 6-9 Nov 2017, Valencia, Spain.

[5] A. Artale, C. Parent, and S. Spaccapietra. Evolving objects in temporal information systems. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 50(1-2):5-38, 2007.

Figuring out the verbalisation of temporal constraints in ontologies and conceptual models

Temporal conceptual models, ontologies, and their logics are nothing new, but that sort of information and knowledge representation still doesn’t gain a lot of traction (cf. say, formal methods for verification). This is in no small part because modelling temporal information is not easy. Several conceptual modelling languages do have various temporal extensions, but most modellers don’t even use all of the default language features yet [1]. How could one at least reduce the barrier to adoption of temporal logics and modelling languages? The two principle approaches are visualisation with a diagrammatic language and rendering it in a (pseudo-)natural language. One of my postgraduate students looked at the former, trying to figure out what would be the best icons and such, which showed there was still a steep learning curve [2]. Before examining whether that could be optimised, I wondered whether the natural language option might be promising. The problem was, that no-one had yet tried to determine what the natural language counterpart of the temporal constraints were supposed to be, let alone whether they be ‘adequate’ or the ‘best’ way of rendering the temporal constraints in tolerable natural language sentences. I wanted to know that badly enough that I tried to find out.

Given that using templates is a tried-and-tested relatively successful approach for atemporal conceptual models and ontologies (e.g., for ORM, the ACE system), it makes sense to do something similar, but then for some temporal extension. As temporal conceptual modelling language I used one that has a Description Logics foundation (DLRUS [3,4]) for that easily links to ontologies as well, added a few known temporal constraints (like for relationships/DL roles, mandatory) and removing others (some didn’t seem all that interesting), which resulted in 34 constraints, still. For each one, I tried to devise more and less reasonable templates, resulting in 101 templates overall. Those templates were evaluated on semantics and preference by three temporal logic experts and five ‘mixed experts’ (experts in natural language generation, logic, or modelling). This resulted in a final set of preferred templates to verbalise the temporal constraints. The remainder of this post first describes a bit about the templates and then the results of which I think they are most interesting.

Templates

The basic idea of a template—in the context of the verbalisation of conceptual models and ontologies—is to have some natural language for the constraint where then the vocabulary gets slotted in at runtime. Take, for instance, simple named class subsumption in an ontology, , for which one could define a template “Each [C] is a(n) [D]”, so that with some axiom , it would generate the sentence “Each Manager is an Employee”. One also could have devised the template “All [C] are [D]” and then it would have generated “All Managers are Employees”. The choice between the two templates in this case is just taste, for in both cases, the semantics is the same. More complex axioms are not always that straightforward. For instance, for the axiom type , would “Each [C] [R] some [D]” be good enough, or would perhaps “Each [C] must [R] at least one [D]” be better? E.g., “Each Professor teaches some Course” vs “Each Professor must teach at least one Course”.

The same can be done for the temporal constraints. To get there, I did a bit of a linguistic detour that informed the template design (described in the paper [5]). Let us take as first example for templates temporal class that has a semantics of ; for instance, UndergraduateStudent (assuming they graduate and end up as alumni or as drop outs, and weren’t undergrads from birth):

1. If an object is an instance of entity type [C], then there is some time where it is not a(n) [C].
2. [C] is an entity type whose objects are, for some time in their existence, not instances of [C].
3. [C] is an entity type of which each object is not a(n) [C] for some time during its existence.
4. All instances of entity type [C] are not a(n) [C] for some time.
5. Each [C] is not a(n) [C] for some time.
6. Each [C] is for some time not a(n) [C].

Which one(s) do you think captures the semantics, and which one(s) do you prefer?

A more elaborate constraint for relationships is ‘dynamic extension for relationships, past, mandatory], which is formalised as where .; e.g., every passenger who boards a flight must have checked in for that flight. Two options could be:

1. Each ..C_1.. ..R_1.. ..C_2.. was preceded by ..C_1.. ..R_2.. ..C_2.. some time earlier.
2. Each ..C_1.. ..R_1.. ..C_2.. must be preceded by ..C_1.. ..R_2.. ..C_2.. .

I’m not saying they are all correct; they were some of the options given, which the participants could choose from and comment on. The full list of constraints and template options are available in the supplementary material, which also contains a file where you can fill in your own answers, see what the (anonymised) participants said, and it has the final list of ‘best’ constraints.

Results

The main aggregate quantitative results are shown in the following table.

Many observations can be made from the data (see the paper for details). Some of the salient aspects are that there was low inter-annotator agreement among the experts, despite that they know each other (temporal logics is a small community) and that the ‘mixed group’ deemed many sentences correct that the experts deemed wrong in the sense of not properly capturing the semantics of the constraint. Put differently, it looks like the mixed experts, as a group, did not fully grasp some subtle distinction in the temporal constraints.

With respect to the templates, the preferred ones don’t follow the structure of the logic, but are, in a way, a separate rendering, or: there’s no neat 1:1 mapping between axiom type and template structure. That said, that doesn’t mean that they always chose the shortest template: the experts definitely did not, while the mixed experts leaned a bit toward preferring templates with fewer words even though they were surely not always the semantically correct option.

It may not look good that the experts preferred different templates, but in a follow-up interview with one of the experts, the expert noted that it was not really a problem “for there is the logic that does have the precise meaning anyway” and thus “resolves any confusion that may arise from using slightly different terminology”. The temporal logic expert does have a point from the expert’s view, fair enough, but that pretty much defeats my aim with the experiment. Asking more non-experts may not be a good strategy either, for they are, on average, too lenient.

So, for now, we do have a set of, relatively, ‘best’ templates to verbalise temporal constraints in temporal conceptual models and ontologies. The next step is to compare that with the diagrammatic representation. This we did [6], and I’ll describe those results informally in a next post.

I’ll present more details at the upcoming CREOL: Contextual Representation of Events and Objects in Language Workshop that is part of the Joint Ontology Workshops 2017, which will be held next week (21-23 September) in Bolzano, Italy. As the KRDB group at FUB in Bolzano has a few temporal logic experts, I’m looking forward to the discussions! Also, I’d be happy if you would be willing to fill in the spreadsheet with your preferences (before looking at the answers given by the participants!), and send them to me.

 

References

[1] Keet, C.M., Fillottrani, P.R. An analysis and characterisation of publicly available conceptual models. 34th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’15). Johannesson, P., Lee, M.L. Liddle, S.W., Opdahl, A.L., Pastor López, O. (Eds.). Springer LNCS vol 9381, 585-593. 19-22 Oct, Stockholm, Sweden.

[2] T. Shunmugam. Adoption of a visual model for temporal database representation. M. IT thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 2016.

[3] A. Artale, E. Franconi, F. Wolter, and M. Zakharyaschev. A temporal description logic for reasoning about conceptual schemas and queries. In S. Flesca, S. Greco, N. Leone, and G. Ianni, editors, Proceedings of the 8th Joint European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence (JELIA-02), volume 2424 of LNAI, pages 98-110. Springer Verlag, 2002.

[4] A. Artale, C. Parent, and S. Spaccapietra. Evolving objects in temporal information systems. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 50(1-2):5-38, 2007.

[5] Keet, C.M. Natural language template selection for temporal constraints. CREOL: Contextual Representation of Events and Objects in Language, Joint Ontology Workshops 2017, 21-23 September 2017, Bolzano, Italy. CEUR-WS Vol. (in print).

[6] Keet, C.M., Berman, S. Determining the preferred representation of temporal constraints in conceptual models. 36th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’17). Springer LNCS. 6-9 Nov 2017, Valencia, Spain. (in print)

On heterogeneous mappings between ontologies

Representing information and knowledge often can be done in different ways even when the same representation language is used. In some cases, one way of representing it is always better than another—or: the other option is sub-optimal or plain wrong—but in other cases the distinction is not all that clear-cut. For instance, whether to represent ‘Employee’ as a subclass of ‘Person’ or that it inheres in ‘Person’. Now, if two ontologies (or conceptual models) represent it differently but they have to be aligned, then how to find such different modelling patterns and how to align them? And, taking a step back: which alternate modelling patterns are there, and why those? We sought to answer these questions, whose outcome will be presented (and appear in the proceedings of [1]) the 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’17) that will take place later this month in Portoroz, Slovenia.

Setting aside the formal stuff in this blog post, let’s first have a look at some of those different modelling patterns. At it’s core, there are 1) modelling practices in ontologies vs conceptual models and 2) foundational [or: top-level, or upper] ontology guidance vs being ‘compacter’ in representing the knowledge. The generalisations of the following handwaivy examples are described in more detail in the paper, but for this blog post, it hopefully will do as a teaser of the six formalised patterns. Take, e.g., the following examples that are all variations on the same theme: to-reify-or-not-to-reify, where the example in B is further dressed up with content from a foundational ontology:

Indeed, in the examples, what is shown on the left-hand side does not have the exact same information content as what is shown on the right-hand side, but the underlying conceptualization is pretty much the same. The models on the right-hand side are more precise, for one has the opportunity to specify those, like stating that a particular marriage is between two persons (so, no group marriages allowed). Whether one always needs such more precise constraints is a separate matter.

Then there’s the Employee example mentioned in this post’s introduction with two alternate ways of representing it:

That is, a modeller chooses between representing the role an object performs/has as a subclass of that object or in a separate hierarchy of roles. Foundational ontologies take the latter option, domain ontologies the former.

These examples are instantiations of small modelling patterns (of which there may be more than the six formalised in the paper). To devise mappings between them, one ends up with alignments in such a way that they are between two patterns, rather than 1:1 mappings. To get there, we had to take some preliminary steps on how to represent it all formally, such as specifying the language for a pattern and a defining an ontology pattern alignment. This allowed us to formalise the patterns and devise that formal specification of the heterogeneous alignments.

That outcome, in turn, feeds into the alignment pattern search and checking algorithms. The algorithms show that it is feasible to find those patterns automatically, which then can propose possible alignments to the modeller, and that, upon aligning, one can check whether that’s done correctly. For instance, take the following two ontologies graphically represented in an (extended, enhanced) ICOM tool:

Two inter-ontology assertions have been made, pointed out with the two yellow arrows; i.e., ‘Tennis’ is a subclass of ‘Tournament’ and ‘TennisPlayer’ is a subclass of ‘Athlete’. The pattern search algorithm then will try to find instantiations for the small modelling patterns for alignment. Once something is found—in this case, pattern A fits—it will check whether all conditions for the alignment can be satisfied, and if so, it will propose a possible alignment, which is shown in the following illustrative figure:

Of interest here is, perhaps, the ‘new’ object property being proposed, indicated with the yellow arrow, that amounts to an equivalence to the partOf+Match+played. (That threesome can’t be mapped as equivalent to ‘participated’ due to differences in domain and range axioms, and drawing three subsumption lines from ‘participated’ to ‘part of’, ‘Match’, and ‘played’ is awkward.). The algorithms’ output then thus reduces the alignment into a final question to the modeller along the line of “are you ok with the alignment between the purple elements in the two diagrams?”, and accept or reject it. Please refer to the paper for further details.

The principles presented could possibly be used also for refactoring of an ontology, like in TDD [2] or when ‘preparing’ an ontology to align to a foundational ontology. More results on this topic are in the pipeline, and if you want to know now already, we can have a chat at ESWC.

References

[1] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M. Patterns for Heterogeneous TBox Mappings to Bridge Different Modelling Decisions. 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’17). Springer LNCS. Portoroz, Slovenia, May 28 – June 2, 2017. (in print)

[2] Keet, C.M., Lawrynowicz, A. Test-Driven Development of Ontologies. In: Proceedings of the 13th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’16). Springer LNCS 9678, 642-657. 29 May – 2 June, 2016, Crete, Greece.

Experimentally-motivated non-trivial intermodel links between conceptual models

I am well aware that some people prefer Agile and mash-ups and such to quickly, scuffily, put an app together, but putting a robust, efficient, lasting, application together does require a bit of planning—analysis and design in the software development process. For instance, it helps to formalise one’s business rules or requirements, or at least structure them with, say, SBVR or ORM, so as to check that the rules obtained from the various stakeholders do not contradict themselves cf. running into problems when testing down the line after having implemented it during a testing phase. Or analyse a bit upfront which classes are needed in the front-end application layer cf. perpetual re-coding to fix one’s mistakes (under the banner ‘refactoring’, as if naming the process gives it an air of respectability), and create, say, a UML diagram or two. Or generating a well-designed database based on an EER model.

Each of these three components can be done in isolation, but how to do this for complex system development where the object-oriented application layer hast to interact with the database back-end, all the while ensuring that the business rules are still adhered to? Or you had those components already, but they need to be integrated? One could link the code to tables in the implementation layer, on an ad hoc basis, and figure it out again and again for any combination of languages and systems. Another one is to do that at the conceptual modelling layer irrespective of the implementation language. The latter approach is reusable (cf. reinventing the mapping wheel time and again), and at a level of abstraction that is easier to cope with for more people, and even more so if the system is really large. So, we went after that option for the past few years and have just added another step to realising all this: how to link which elements in the different models for the system.

It is not difficult to imagine a tool where one can have several windows open, each with a model in some conceptual modelling language—many CASE tools already support modelling in different notations anyway. It is conceptually also fairly straightforward when in, say, the UML model there is a class ‘Employee’ and in the ER diagram there’s an ‘Employee’ entity type: it probably will work out to align these classes. Implementing just this is a bit of an arduous engineering task, but doable. In fact, there is such a tool for models represented in the same language, where the links can be subsumption, equivalence, or disjointness between classes or between relationships: ICOM [2]. But we need something like that to work across modelling languages as well, and for attributes, too. In the hand-waiving abstract sense, this may be intuitively trivial, but the gory details of the conceptual and syntax aspects are far from it. For instance, what should a modeller do if one model has ‘Address’ as an attribute and the other model has it represented as a class? Link the two despite being different types of constructs in the respective languages? Or that ever-recurring example of modelling marriage: a class ‘Marriage’ with (at least) two participants, or ‘Marriage’ as a recursive relationship (UML association) of a ‘Person’ class? What to do if a modeller in one model had chosen the former option and another modeller the latter? Can they be linked up somehow nonetheless, or would one have to waste a lot of time redesigning the other model?

Instead of analysing this for each case, we sought to find a generic solution to it; with we being: Zubeida Khan, Pablo Fillottrani, Karina Cenci, and I. The solution we propose will appear soon in the proceedings of the 20^th Conference on Advances in DataBases and Information Systems (ADBIS’16) that will be held at the end of this month in Prague.

So, what did we do? First, we tried to narrow down the possible links between elements in the models: in theory, one might want to try to link anything to anything, but we already knew some model elements are incompatible, and we were hoping that others wouldn’t be needed yet other suspected to be needed, so that a particular useful subset could be the focus. To determine that, we analysed a set of ICOM projects created by students at the Universidad Nacionál del Sur (in Bahía Blanca), and we created model integration scenarios based on publicly available conceptual models of several subject domains, such as hospitals, airlines, and so on, including EER diagrams, UML class diagrams, and ORM models. An example of an integration scenario is shown in the figure below: two conceptual models about airline companies, with on the left the ER diagram and on the right the UML diagram.

One of the integration scenarios [1]

The solid purple links are straightforward 1:1 mappings; e.g., er:Airlines = uml:Airline. Long-dashed dashed lines represent ‘half links’ that are semantically very similar, such as er:Flight.Arr_time ≈ uml:Flight.arrival_time, where the idea of attribute is the same, but ER attributes don’t have a datatype specified whereas UML attributes do. The red short-dashed dashed lines require some transformation: e.g., er:Airplane.Type is an attribute yet uml:Aircraft is a class, and er:Airport.code is an identifier (with its mandatory 1:1 constraint, still no datatype) but uml:Airport.ID is just a simple attribute. Overall, we had 40 models with 33 schema matchings, with 25 links in the ICOM projects and 258 links in the integration scenarios. The detailed aggregates are described in the paper and the dataset is available for reuse (7MB). Unsurprisingly, there were more attribute links than class links (if a class can be linked, then typically also some of its attributes). There were 64 ‘half’ links and 48 transformation links, notably on the slightly compatible attributes, attributes vs. identifiers, attribute<->value type, and attribute<->class.

Armed with these insights from the experiment, a general intermodel link validation approach [3] that uses the unified metamodel [4], and which type of elements occur mostly in conceptual models with their logic-based profiles [5,6], we set out to define those half links and transformation links. While this could have been done with a logic of choice, we opted for a clear step toward implementability by exploiting the ATLAS Transformation Language (ATL) [7] to specify the transformations. As there’s always a source model and a target model in ATL, we constructed the mappings such that both models in question are the ‘source’ and both are mapped into a new, single, ‘target’ model that still adheres to the constraints imposed by the unifying metamodel. A graphical depiction of the idea is shown in the figure below; see paper for details of the mapping rules (they don’t look nice in a blog post).

Informal, graphical rendering of the rule Attribute<->Object Type output [1]

Someone into this matter might think, based on this high-level description, there’s nothing new here. However, there is, and the paper has an extensive related works section. For instance, there’s related work on Distributed Description Logics with bridge rules [8], but they don’t do attributes and the logics used for that doesn’t fit well with the features needed for conceptual modelling, so it cannot be adopted without substantial modifications. Triple Graph Grammars look quite interesting [9] for this sort of task, as does DOL [10], but either would require another year or two to figure it out (feel free to go ahead already). On the practical side, e.g., the Eclipse metamodel of the popular Eclipse Modeling Framework didn’t have enough in the metamodel for what needs to be included, both regarding types of entities and the constraints that would need to be enforced. And so on, such that by a process of elimination, we ended up with ATL.

It would be good to come up with those logic-based linking options and proofs of correctness of the transformation rules presented in the paper, but in the meantime, an architecture design of the new tool was laid out in [11], which is in the stage of implementation as I write this. For now, at least a step has been taken from the three years of mostly theory and some experimentation toward implementation of all that. To be continued J.

 

References

[1] Khan, Z.C., Keet, C.M., Fillottrani, P.R., Cenci, K.M. Experimentally motivated transformations for intermodel links between conceptual models. 20th Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS’16). Springer LNCS. August 28-31, Prague, Czech Republic. (in print)

[2] Fillottrani, P.R., Franconi, E., Tessaris, S. The ICOM 3.0 intelligent conceptual modelling tool and methodology. Semantic Web Journal, 2012, 3(3): 293-306.

[3] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M. Conceptual Model Interoperability: a Metamodel-driven Approach. 8th International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML’14), A. Bikakis et al. (Eds.). Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS vol. 8620, 52-66. August 18-20, 2014, Prague, Czech Republic.

[4] Keet, C.M., Fillottrani, P.R. An ontology-driven unifying metamodel of UML Class Diagrams, EER, and ORM2. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2015, 98:30-53.

[5] Keet, C.M., Fillottrani, P.R. An analysis and characterisation of publicly available conceptual models. 34th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’15). Johannesson, P., Lee, M.L. Liddle, S.W., Opdahl, A.L., Pastor López, O. (Eds.). Springer LNCS vol 9381, 585-593. 19-22 Oct, Stockholm, Sweden.

[6] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M. Evidence-based Languages for Conceptual Data Modelling Profiles. 19th Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS’15). Morzy et al. (Eds.). Springer LNCS vol. 9282, 215-229. Poitiers, France, Sept 8-11, 2015.

[7] Jouault, F. Allilaire, F. Bzivin, J. Kurtev, I. ATL: a model transformation tool. Science of Computer Programming, 2008, 72(12):31-39.

[8] Ghidini, C., Serafini, L., Tessaris, S., Complexity of reasoning with expressive ontology mappings. Formal ontology in Information Systems (FOIS’08). IOS Press, FAIA vol. 183, 151-163.

[9] Golas, U., Ehrig, H., Hermann, F. Formal specification of model transformations by triple graph grammars with application conditions. Electronic Communications of the ESSAT, 2011, 39: 26.

[10] Mossakowsi, T., Codescu, M., Lange, C. The distributed ontology, modeling and specification language. Proceedings of the Workshop on Modular Ontologies 2013 (WoMo’13). CEUR-WS vol 1081. Corunna, Spain, September 15, 2013.

[11] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M. A Design for Coordinated and Logics-mediated Conceptual Modelling. 29th International Workshop on Description Logics (DL’16). Peñaloza, R. and Lenzerini, M. (Eds.). CEUR-WS Vol. 1577. April 22-25, Cape Town, South Africa. (abstract)

Reblogging 2009: Building bias into your database

From the “10 years of keetblog – reblogging: 2009”: The tl;dr of it: bad data management -> bad policy decisions, and how you can embed political preferences and prejudices in a conceptual data model.

While the post has a computing flavor to it especially on the database design and a touch of ontologies, it is surely also of general interest, because it gives some insight into the management of data that is used for policy-making in and for conflict zones. A nicer version of this blog post and the one after that made it into a paper-review article “Dirty wars, databases, and indices” in the Peace & Conflict Review journal (Fall 2009 issue) of the UN-mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica.

Building bias into your database; Jan 7, 2009

 p.s.: while I intended to write a post on attending the ER’15 conferences, the exciting times with the student protests in South Africa put that plan on the backburner for a few more days at least.

—–

For developing bio-ontologies, if one follows Barry Smith and cs., then one is solely concerned with the representation of reality; moreover, it has been noted that ontologies can, or should be, seen as a representation of a scientific theory [1] or at least that they are an important part of doing science [2]. In that case, life is easy, not hard, for we have the established method of scientific inquiry to settle disputes (among others, by doing additional lab experiments to figure out more about reality). Domain- and application ontologies, as well as conceptual data models, for the enterprise universe of discourse require, at times, a consensus-based approach where some parts of the represented information are the outcome of negotiations and agreements among the stakeholders.

Going one step further on the sliding scale: for databases and application software for the humanities, and conflict databases in particular, one makes an ontology or conceptual data model conforming to one’s own (or the funding organisation’s) political convictions and with the desired conclusions in mind. Building data vaults seems to be the intended norm rather than the exception, hence, maintenance and usage and data analysis beyond the developers limited intentions, let alone integration, are a nightmare.

 In this post, I will outline some suggestions for building your own politicized representation—be it an ontology or conceptual data model—for armed conflict data, such as terrorist incidents, civil war, and inter-state war. I will discuss in the next post a few examples of conflict data analysis, both regarding extant databases and the ‘dirty war index’ application built on top of them. A later post may deal with a solution to the problems, but for now, it would already be a great help not to adhere to the tips below.

Tips for biasing the representation

In random order, you could do any of the following to pollute the model and hamper data analysis so as to ensure your data is scientifically unreliable but suitable to serve your political agenda.

1. Have a fairly flat taxonomy of types of parties; in fact, just two subtypes suffice: US and THEM, although one could subtype the latter into ‘they’, ‘with them’, and ‘for them’. The analogue, with ‘we’, ‘with us’, and ‘for us’ is too risky for potential of contagion of responsibility of atrocities and therefore not advisable to include; if you want to record any of it, then it is better to introduce types such as ‘unknown perpetrator’ or ‘not officially claimed event’ or ‘independent actor’.

2. Aggregate creatively. For instance, if some of the funding for your database comes from a building construction or civil engineering company, refine that section of target types, or include new target types only when you feel like it is targeted sufficiently often by the opponent to warrant a whole new tuple or table from then onwards. Likewise, some funding agencies would like to see a more detailed breakdown of types of victims by types of violence, some don’t. Last, be careful with the typology of arms used, in particular when your country is producing them; a category like ‘DIY explosive device’ helps masking the producer.

3. Under-/over-represent geography. Play with granularity (by city/village, region, country, continent) and categorization criteria (state borders, language, former chiefdoms, parishes, and so forth), e.g., include (or not) notions such as ‘occupied territory’ (related to the actors) and `liberated region’ or `autonomous zone’, or that an area may, or may not, be categorized or named differently at the same time. Above all, make the modelling decisions in an inconsistent way, so that no single dimension can be analysed properly.

4. Make an a-temporal model and pretend not to change it, but (a) allow non-traceable object migration so that defecting parties who used to be with US (see point 1) can be safely re-categorised as THEM, and (b) refine the hierarchy over time anyway so as to generate time-inconsistency for target types (see point 2) and geography (see point 3), in order to avoid time series analyses and prevent discovering possible patterns.

5. Have a minimal amount of classes for bibliographic information, lest someone would want to verify the primary/secondary sources that report on numbers of casualties and discovers you only included media reports from the government-censored newspapers (or the proxy-funding agency, or the rebel radio station, or the guerrilla pamphlets).

6. Keep natural language definitions for key concepts in a separate file, if recorded at all. This allows for time-inconsistency in operational definitions as well as ignorance of the data entry clerks so that each one can have his own ideas about where in the database the conflict data should go.

7. Minimize the use of database integrity constraints, hence, minimize representing constraints in the ontology to begin with, hence, use a very simple modelling language so you can blame the language for not representing the subject domain adequately.

I’m not saying all conflict databases use all of these tricks; but some use at least most of them, which ruins credibility of those database of which the analysts actually did try to avoid these pitfalls (assuming there are such databases, that is). Optimism wants me to believe developers did not think of all those issues when designing the database. However, there is a tendency that each conflict researcher compiles his own data set and that each database is built from scratch.

For the current scope, I will set aside the problems with data collection and how to arrive at guesstimated semi-reliable approximations of deaths, severe injuries, rape, torture victims and so forth (see e.g. [3] and appendix B of [4]). Inherent problems with data collection is one thing and difficult to fix, bad modelling and dubious or partial data analysis is a whole different thing and doable to fix. I elaborate on latter claim in the next post.

References

[1] Barry Smith. Ontology (Science). In: C. Eschenbach and M. Gruninger (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proceedings of FOIS 2008. preprint

[2] Keet, C.M. Factors affecting ontology development in ecology. Data Integration in the Life Sciences 2005 (DILS’05), Ludaescher, B, Raschid, L. (eds.). San Diego, USA, 20-22 July 2005. Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics LNBI 3615, Springer Verlag, 2005. pp46-62.

[3] Taback N (2008 ) The Dirty War Index: Statistical issues, feasibility, and interpretation. PLoS Med 5(12): e248. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050248.

[4] Weinstein, Jeremy M. (2007). Inside rebellion—the politics of insurgent violence. Cambridge University Press. 402p.

Fruitful ADBIS’15 in Poitiers

The 19th Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS’15) just finished yesterday. It was an enjoyable and well-organised conference in the lovely town of Poitiers, France. Thanks to the general chair, Ladjel Bellatreche, and the participants I had the pleasure to meet up with, listen to, and receive feedback from. The remainder of this post mainly recaps the keynotes and some of the presentations.

 

Keynotes

The conference featured two keynotes, one by Serge Abiteboul and on by Jens Dittrich, both distinguished scientists in databases. Abiteboul presented the multi-year project on Webdamlog that ended up as a ‘personal information management system’, which is a simple term that hides the complexity that happens behind the scenes. (PIMS is informally explained here). It breaks with the paradigm of centralised text (e.g., Facebook) to distributed knowledge. To achieve that, one has to analyse what’s happening and construct the knowledge from that, exchange knowledge, and reason and infer knowledge. This requires distributed reasoning, exchanging facts and rules, and taking care of access control. It is being realised with a datalog-style language but that then also can handle a non-local knowledge base. That is, there’s both solid theory and implementation (going by the presentation; I haven’t had time to check it out).

The main part of the cool keynote talk by Dittrich was on ‘the case for small data management’. From the who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire style popquiz question asking us to guess the typical size of a web database, it appeared to be only in the MBs (which most of us overestimated), and sort of explains why MySQL [that doesn’t scale well] is used rather widely. This results in a mismatch between problem size and tools. Another popquiz question answer: the 100MB RDF can just as well be handled efficiently by python, apparently. Interesting factoids, and one that has/should have as consequence we should be looking perhaps more into ‘small data’. He presented his work on PDbF as an example of that small data management. Very briefly, and based on my scribbles from the talk: its an enhanced pdf where you can access the raw data behind the graphs in the paper as well (it is embedded in it, with OLAP engine for posing the same and other queries), has a html rendering so you can hover over the graphs, and some more visualisation. If there’s software associated with the paper, it can go into the whole thing as well. Overall, that makes the data dynamic, manageable, traceable (from figure back to raw data), and re-analysable. The last part of his talk was on his experiences with the flipped classroom (more here; in German), but that was not nearly as fun as his analysis and criticism of the “big data” hype. I can’t recall exactly his plain English terms for the “four V4”, but the ‘lots of crappy XML data that changes’ remained of it in my memory bank (it was similar to the first 5 minutes of another keynote talk he gave).

 

Sessions

Sure, despite the notes on big data, there were presentations in the sessions that could be categorised under ‘big data’. Among others, Ajantha Dahanayake presented a paper on a proposal for requirements engineering for big data [1]. Big data people tend to assume it is just there already for them to play with. But how did it get there, how to collect good data? The presentation outlined a scenario-based backwards analysis, so that one can reduce unnecessary or garbage data collection. Dahanayake also has a tool for it. Besides the requirements analysis for big data, there’s also querying the data and the desire to optimize it so as to keep having fast responses despite its large size. A solution to that was presented by Reuben Ndindi, whose paper also won the best paper award of the conference [2] (for the Malawians at CS@UCT: yes, the Reuben you know). It was scheduled in the very last session on Friday and my note-taking had grinded to a halt. If my memory serves me well, they make a metric database out of a regular database, compute the distances between the values, and evaluate the query on that, so as to obtain a good approximation of the true answer. There’s both the theoretical foundation and an experimental validation of the approach. In the end, it’s faster.

Data and schema evolution research is alive and well, as were time series and temporal aspects. Due to parallel sessions and my time constraints writing this post, I’ll mention only two on the evolution; one because it was a very good talk, the other because of the results of the experiments. Kai Herrmann presented the CoDEL language for database evolution [3]. A database and the application that uses it change (e.g., adding an attribute, splitting a table), which requires quite lengthy scripts with lots of SQL statements to execute. CoDEL does it with fewer statements, and the language has the good quality of being relationally complete [3]. Lesley Wevers approached the problem from a more practical angle and restricted to online databases. For instance, Wikipedia does make updates to their database schema, but they wouldn’t want to have Wikipedia go offline for that duration. How long does it take for which operation, in which RDBMS, and will it only slow down during the schema update, or block any use of the database entirely? The results obtained with MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle are a bit of a mixed bag [4]. It generated a lively debate during the presentation regarding the test set-up, what one would have expected the results to be, and the duration of blocking. There’s some work to do there yet.

The presentation of the paper I co-authored with Pablo Fillottrani [5] (informally described here) was scheduled for that dreaded 9am slot the morning after the social dinner. Notwithstanding, quite a few participants did show up, and they showed interest. The questions and comments had to do with earlier work we used as input (the metamodel), qualifying quality of the conceptual model, and that all too familiar sense of disappointment that so few language features were used widely in publicly available conceptual models (the silver lining of excellent prospects of runtime usage of conceptual models notwithstanding). Why this is so, I don’t know, though I have my guesses.

 

And the other things that make conference useful and fun to go to

In short: Networking, meeting up again with colleagues not seen for a while (ranging from a few months [Robert Wrembel] to some 8 years [Nadeem Iftikhar] and in between [a.o., Martin Rezk, Bernhard Thalheim]), meeting new people, exchanging ideas, and the social events.

2008 was the last time I’d been in France, for EMMSAD’08, where, looking back now, I coincidentally presented a paper also on conceptual modelling languages and logic [6], but one that looked at comprehensive feature coverage and comparing languages rather than unifying. It was good to be back in France, and it was nice to realise my understanding and speaking skills in French aren’t as rusty as I thought they were. The travels from South Africa are rather long, but definitely worthwhile. And it gives me time to write blog posts killing time on the airport.

 

References

(note: most papers don’t show up at Google scholar yet, hence, no links; they are on the Springer website, though)

[1] Noufa Al-Najran and Ajantha Dahanayake. A Requirements Specification Framework for Big Data Collection and Capture. ADBIS’15. Morzy et al. (Eds.). Springer LNCS vol. 9282, .

[2] Boris Cule, Floris Geerts and Reuben Ndindi. Space-bounded query approximation. ADBIS’15. Morzy et al. (Eds.). Springer LNCS vol. 9282, 397-414.

[3] Kai Herrmann, Hannes Voigt, Andreas Behrend and Wolfgang Lehner. CoDEL – A Relationally Complete Language for Database Evolution. ADBIS’15. Morzy et al. (Eds.). Springer LNCS vol. 9282, 63-76.

[4] Lesley Wevers, Matthijs Hofstra, Menno Tammens, Marieke Huisman and Maurice van Keulen. Analysis of the Blocking Behaviour of Schema Transformations in Relational Database Systems. ADBIS’15. Morzy et al. (Eds.). Springer LNCS vol. 9282, 169-183.

[5] Pablo R. Fillottrani and C. Maria Keet. Evidence-based Languages for Conceptual Data Modelling Profiles. ADBIS’15. Morzy et al. (Eds.). Springer LNCS vol. 9282, 215-229.

[6] C. Maria Keet. A formal comparison of conceptual data modeling languages. EMMSAD’08. CEUR-WS Vol-337, 25-39.

The ontology-driven unifying metamodel of UML class diagrams, ER, EER, ORM, and ORM2

Metamodelling of conceptual data modelling languages is nothing new, and one may wonder why one would need yet another one. But you do, if you want to develop complex systems or integrate various legacy sources (which South Africa is going to invest more money in) and automate at least some parts of it. For instance: you want to link up the business rules modelled in ORM, the EER diagram of the database, and the UML class diagram that was developed for the application layer. Are the, say, Student entity types across the models really the same kind of thing? And UML’s attribute StudentID vs. the one in the EER diagram? Or EER’s EmployeesDependent weak entity type with the ORM business rule that states that “each dependent of an employee is identified by EmployeeID an the Dependent’s Name?

Ascertaining the correctness of such inter-model assertions in different languages does not require a comparison and contrast of their differences, but a way to harmonise or unify them. Some such models already exist, but they take subsets of the languages, whereas all those features do appear in actual models [1] (described here informally). Our metamodel, in contrast, aims to capture all constructs of the aforementioned languages and the constraints that hold between them, and generalize in an ontology-driven way so that the integrated metamodel subsumes the structural, static elements of them (i.e., the integrated metamodel has as them as fragments). Besides some updates to the earlier metamodel fragment presented in [2,3], the current version [4,5] also includes the metamodel fragment of their constraints (though omits temporal aspects and derived constraints). The metamodel and its explanation can be found in the paper in An ontology-driven unifying metamodel of UML Class Diagrams, EER, and ORM2 [4] that I co-authored with Pablo Fillottrani, and which was recently accepted in Data & Knowledge Engineering.

Methodologically, the unifying metamodel presented in An ontology-driven unifying metamodel of UML Class Diagrams, EER, and ORM2 [4], is ontological rather than formal (cf. all other known works). On that ‘ontology-driven approach’, here is meant the use of insights from Ontology (philosophy) and ontologies (in computing) to enhance the quality of a conceptual data model and obtain that ‘glue stuff’ to unify the metamodels of the languages. The DKE paper describes all that, such as: on the nature of the UML association/ORM fact type (different wording, same ontological commitment), attributes with and without data types, the plethora of identification constraints (weak entity types, reference modes, etc.), where can one reuse an ‘attribute’ if at all, and more. The main benefit of this approach is being able to cope with the larger amount of elements that are present in those languages, and it shows that, in the details, the overlap in features across the languages is rather small: 4 among the set of 23 types of relationship, role, and entity type are essentially the same across the languages (see figure below), and 6 of the 49 types of constraints. The metamodel is stable for the modelling languages covered. It is represented in UML for ease of communication, but, as mentioned earlier, it also has been formalised in the meantime [5].

Types of elements in the languages; black-shaded: entity is present in all three language families (UML, EER, ORM); dark grey: on two of the three; light grey: in one; while-filled: in none, but we added the more general entities to ‘glue’ things together. (Source: [4])

Metamodel fragment with some constraints among some of the entities. (Source [4])

The DKE paper also puts it in a broader context with examples, model analyses using the harmonised terminology, and a use case scenario that demonstrates the usefulness of the metamodel for inter-model assertions.

While the 24-page paper is rather comprehensive, research results wouldn’t live up to it if it didn’t uncover new questions. Some of them have been, and are being, answered in the meantime, such as its use for classifying models and comparing their characteristics [1,6] (blogged about here and here) and a rule-based approach to validating inter-model assertions [7] (informally here). Although the 3-year funded project on the Ontology-driven unification of conceptual data modelling languages—which surely contributed to realising this paper—just finished officially, we’re not done yet, or: more is in the pipeline. To be continued…

 

References

[1] Keet, C.M., Fillottrani, P.R. An analysis and characterisation of publicly available conceptual models. 34th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’15). Springer LNCS. 19-22 Oct, Stockholm, Sweden. (in press)

[2] Keet, C.M., Fillottrani, P.R. Toward an ontology-driven unifying metamodel for UML Class Diagrams, EER, and ORM2. 32nd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’13). W. Ng, V.C. Storey, and J. Trujillo (Eds.). Springer LNCS 8217, 313-326. 11-13 November, 2013, Hong Kong.

[3] Keet, C.M., Fillottrani, P.R. Structural entities of an ontology-driven unifying metamodel for UML, EER, and ORM2. 3rd International Conference on Model & Data Engineering (MEDI’13). A. Cuzzocrea and S. Maabout (Eds.) September 25-27, 2013, Amantea, Calabria, Italy. Springer LNCS 8216, 188-199.

[4] Keet, C.M., Fillottrani, P.R. An ontology-driven unifying metamodel of UML Class Diagrams, EER, and ORM2. Data & Knowledge Engineering. 2015. DOI: 10.1016/j.datak.2015.07.004. (in press)

[5] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M. KF metamodel Formalization. Technical Report, Arxiv.org http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6545. Dec 19, 2014. 26p.

[6] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M. Evidence-based Languages for Conceptual Data Modelling Profiles. 19th Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS’15). Springer LNCS. Poitiers, France, Sept 8-11, 2015. (in press)

[7] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M. Conceptual Model Interoperability: a Metamodel-driven Approach. 8th International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML’14), A. Bikakis et al. (Eds.). Springer LNCS 8620, 52-66. August 18-20, 2014, Prague, Czech Republic.