Ontology-based Model Synchronisation

Models are the central artifact in Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD). Being defined by meta models, they expose a strict syntactic structure. This property allows for processing models mechanically and using generic tools for arbitrary models. However, the wellknown meta modelling languages (e.g., Essential MOF (EMOF)) do not have a formal semantical foundation. Rather, the semantics of models is defined implicitly and informal in respective specification documents. To resolve this restriction, the integration of models and ontologies has been proposed earlier [1]. In contrast to models, ontologies do have a formal grounding and allow for more sophisticated reasoning about the information represented therein. This paper presents an approach to employ the ontological representation of models for synchronising changes across related models. Existing ideas from ontology mapping and alignment are applied to model synchronisation to investigate to what extent these technologies can be used in MDSD.