OntolAD: a formal ontology for architectural descriptions

Abstract

Architecture descriptions have been the focus of several studies in which they contribute for the design, evaluation, and evolution of software systems. In parallel, ontologies have been proposed for sharing and disseminating knowledge on a particular domain. In this scenario, the ontology proposed in the ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 standard for architecture descriptions represents an important e ort towards improving architecture descriptions as it establishes a common vocabulary. Nonetheless, a formal ontology for this standard could also support automatic conformance validation and enhance architectural descriptions reuse. However, a formal ontology for this standard is not available yet. Therefore, the main contribution of this paper is the proposal of OntolAD, a formal ontology expressed in OWL 2 for the ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 standard. We demonstrate the feasibility of our formal ontology by applying it for describing the service-oriented architecture style (SOA). We conclude this study with interesting perspectives of using this ontology in future work.