Applications of Ontologies in Software Engineering

From Hans-Jörg Happel and Stefan Seedorf :
The Article

Abstract. The emerging field of semantic web technologies promises new stimulus for Software Engineering research. However, since the underlying concepts of the semantic web have a long tradition in the knowledge engineering field, it is sometimes hard for software engineers to overlook the variety of ontology-enabled approaches to Software Engineering. In this paper we therefore present some examples of ontology applications throughout the Software Engineering lifecycle. We discuss the advantages of ontologies in each case and provide a framework for classifying the usage of ontologies in Software Engineering.

Graphical versus textual DSLs

We are presently developing for a customer a DSL that aims to map different data structures. Our solution is based an Xtext of oAW. As its name said, Xtext is a framework that enables the development of textual DSLs. Our customer was scarred when he understood that he will have to WRITE code with our DSL. He had in mind a more user friendly DSL, something more graphical.

But is a graphical DSL more user frienly? Here some advantages that textual representations have over graphical notations:

• while graphical notations are often useful to describe structural concepts (e.g. class diagrams), textual notations are often a better fit for describing behavior or algorithms (e.g. expressions)
  
• expert users often find them faster and easier to modify
• there is a rich set of existing tooling for dealing with text files (diff, merge, copy & paste, search & replace ...).
• by using any source control systems (CVS, SVN, ...) it is possible to manage different versions of the DSL.

The textual or graphical nature of a DSL represents only the concrete syntax of the language. The abstract syntax is anyway independant of this discussion. This means also that it should alway be possible to transform a textual representation in a graphical one and vice versa.