Semantic Web-Based Information Systems: State-of-the-Art ...

0 Corcho & Gómez-Pérez
Figure 9. Task decomposition of activity 3 (design of the ontology translation system)
the pragmatic and semantic levels, leaving the syntax and lexical transformations
for the last steps. The pragmatic and semantic translation decisions are proposed
mainly by knowledge engineers, while the syntax and lexical transformations can be
proposed jointly by knowledge and software engineers, since they have more to do
with general programming aspects rather than with the complexity of transforming
knowledge. The method proposes to represent these translation decisions mainly
with tables and diagrams, such as the ones proposed in Table 3 and Figure 10 for
transformations between WebODE and OWL DL.
Finally, the objective of the last task is to propose any additional transformations or
design issues that have not been covered by the previous tasks, because they could
not be catalogued as lexical, syntax, semantic, or pragmatic transformations, which
are necessary for the correct functioning of the ontology translation system. These
transformations include design issues such as the initialization and setting up of
parameters in the source and target formats, any foreseen integration needs of the
generated system in the case of transformations where ontology tools or specific
libraries are used, and so forth.
As shown in Figure 9, we may need to come back to the second group of activities
after proposing some additional transformations. This is a cyclic process until
we have determined all the transformation to be performed in the corresponding
development iteration. All the output results obtained from the tasks in this activity
are integrated in a single document called “translation system design document,”
as shown in the figure.
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