Model-driven Generation of APIs for OWL-based Ontologies

Existing tools for generating application programming interfaces (APIs) for ontologies lack sophisticated support for mapping the logics-based concepts of the ontology to an appropriate object-oriented implementation of the API. Such a mapping has to overcome the fundamental differences between the semantics described in the ontology and the pragmatics, i.e., structure, functionalities, and behavior implemented in the API. Typically, concepts from the ontology are mapped one-toone to classes in the targeted programming language. Such a mapping only produces concept representations but not an API at the desired level of granularity expected by an application developer. We present a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) process to generate customized APIs for ontologies. This API generation is based on the semantics defined in the ontology but also leverages additional information the ontology provides. This can be the inheritance structure of the ontology concepts, the scope of relevance of an ontology concept, or design patterns defined in the ontology.