Ontology Engineering for Collaborative Embedded Systems - Requirements and Initial Approach

Collaborative embedded systems (CES) heavily rely on information models to understand the contextual situations they are exposed to. These information models serve different purposes. First, during development time it is necessary to model the context for eliciting and documenting the requirements that a CES is supposed to achieve. Second, information models provide information to simulate different contextual situations and CES ́s behavior in these situations. Finally, CESs need information models about their context during runtime in order to react to different contextual situations and exchange context information with other CESs. Heavyweight ontologies, based on Ontology Web Language (OWL), have already proven suitable for representing knowledge about contextual situations during runtime. Furthermore, lightweight ontologies (e.g. class diagrams) have proven their practicality for creating domain specific languages for requirements documentation. However, building an ontology (lightor heavyweight) is a non-trivial task that needs to be integrated into development methods for CESs such that it serves the above stated purposes in a seamless way. This paper introduces the requirements for the building of ontologies and proposes a method that is integrated into the engineering of CESs.