Prototype Generation from Ontology Charts

Semantic Analysis is a business analysis method designed to capture system requirements. While these requirements may be represented as text, the method also advocates the use of Ontology Charts to formally denote the system's required roles, relationships and forms of communication. Following model driven engineering techniques, Ontology Charts can be transformed to temporal Database schemas, class diagrams and component diagrams, which can then be used to produce software systems. A nice property of these transformations is that resulting system design models lend themselves to complicated extensions that do not require changes to the design models. For example, resulting databases can be extended with new types of data without the need to modify the database schema of the legacy system. Semantic Analysis is not widely used in software engineering, so there is a lack of experts in the field and no design patterns are available. This make it difficult for the analysts to pass organizational knowledge to the engineers. This study describes an implementation that is readily usable by engineers, which includes an automated technique that can produce a prototype from an Ontology Chart. The use of such tools should enable developers to make use of Semantic Analysis with minimal expertise of ontologies and MDA.