Abstract
Taxonomies play a central role in conceptual domain modeling having a direct impact in areas such as knowledge representation, ontology engineering, software engineering, as well as in knowledge organization in information sciences. Despite their key role, there is in the literature little guidance on how to build high-quality taxonomies, with notable exceptions such as the OntoClean methodology, and the ontology-driven conceptual modeling language OntoUML. These techniques take into account the ontological meta-properties of types to establish well-founded rules for forming taxonomic structures. In this paper, we show how to leverage on the formal rules underlying these techniques to build taxonomies which are correct by construction. We define a set of correctness-preserving operations to systematically introduce types and subtyping relations into taxonomic structures. To validate our proposal, we formalize these operations as a graph grammar. Moreover, to demonstrate our claim of correctness by construction, we use automatic verification techniques over the grammar language to show that: (i) all taxonomies produced by the grammar rules are correct; and (ii) the rules can generate all correct taxonomies.
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Available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/groove/.
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Acknowledgments
This research is partly funded by Brazilian funding agencies CNPq (grants numbers 312123/2017-5 and 407235/2017-5) and CAPES (Finance Code 001 and grant number 23038.028816/2016-41).
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Batista, J.O., Almeida, J.P.A., Zambon, E., Guizzardi, G. (2021). Building Correct Taxonomies with a Well-Founded Graph Grammar. In: Cherfi, S., Perini, A., Nurcan, S. (eds) Research Challenges in Information Science. RCIS 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 415. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75018-3_33
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