Model-driven Generation of APIsfor OWL-based Ontologies

Existing tools for generating application programming interfaces(APIs) for ontologies lack sophisticated support for mapping thelogics-based concepts of the ontology to an appropriate object-orientedimplementation of the API. Such a mapping has to overcome the fundamentaldierences between the semantics described in the ontology andthe pragmatics, i.e., structure, functionalities, and behavior implementedin the API. Typically, concepts from the ontology are mapped one-tooneto classes in the targeted programming language. Such a mappingonly produces concept representations but not an API at the desiredlevel of granularity expected by an application developer. We present aModel-Driven Engineering (MDE) process to generate customized APIsfor ontologies. This API generation is based on the semantics denedin the ontology but also leverages additional information the ontologyprovides. This can be the inheritance structure of the ontology concepts,the scope of relevance of an ontology concept, or design patterns denedin the ontology.[...]