Mapping the Object-Role Modeling language ORM2 into Description Logic language DLRifd

TL;DR

This paper presents a precise mapping of ORM2, a complex conceptual data modeling language, into the decidable Description Logic DLRifd, enabling automated reasoning and better interoperability with other modeling languages.

Contribution

It provides the first exact transformation of ORM2 features into DLRifd, facilitating reasoning and integration with UML and EER models.

Findings

Mapped ORM2 features into DLRifd, enabling reasoning.

Identified limitations in mapping some ORM2 features.

Showcased potential for interoperation between models.

Abstract

In recent years, several efforts have been made to enhance conceptual data modelling with automated reasoning to improve the model's quality and derive implicit information. One approach to achieve this in implementations, is to constrain the language. Advances in Description Logics can help choosing the right language to have greatest expressiveness yet to remain within the decidable fragment of first order logic to realise a workable implementation with good performance using DL reasoners. The best fit DL language appears to be the ExpTime-complete DLRifd. To illustrate trade-offs and highlight features of the modelling languages, we present a precise transformation of the mappable features of the very expressive (undecidable) ORM/ORM2 conceptual data modelling languages to exactly DLRifd. Although not all ORM2 features can be mapped, this is an interesting fragment because it has been shown that DLRifd can also encode UML Class Diagrams and EER, and therefore can foster interoperation between conceptual data models and research into ontological aspects of the modelling languages.