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Object-Process Methodology and Its Application to the Visual Semantic Web

Full-Day Tutorial
June 7, 2004

Dov Dori

Technion, Israel Institute of Technology dori@ie.technion.ac.il 
and Massachusetts Institute of Technology dori@mit.edu 

Background

A comprehensive system modeling methodology with coherent ontology is essential for system architecting and engineering. Object-Process Methodology is a unifying approach for developing, communicating, supporting and evolving systems of various domains, types, magnitudes and complexities. OPM is founded on well-defined ontology with solid infrastructure; it has clear, formal, single-model semantics expressed bi-modally via graphics and natural language. It enable fast and reliable system modeling; and it caters to domain experts who are not IT professionals and therefore enables them to actively engage in the development process as part of the team. Taught at leading institutions of higher education and used in Industry, OPM has evolved as a significant extension of Object technology which caters equally well to systems' structure (through objects and relations) and behavior (through processes that transform objects). OPM encompasses the entire lifecycle of a software system or product, from concept and initiation through development to deployment.

The Visual Semantic Web (VSW) is a new paradigm for enhancing the current Semantic Web technology. VSW, which is based on OPM, provides for representation of knowledge over the Web in a unified way that caters to human perceptions while also being machine-processable. The advantages of the VSW approach include graphic-text knowledge representation, visual navigability, semantic sentence interpretation, specification of system dynamics, and complexity management.

Tutorial Goals and History

The tutorial will present the underlying OPM ontology and its application for the Visual Semantic Web. It is based in part on material prof. Dov Dori has been teaching at MIT's Engineering Systems Division as well as the Summer Professional Institute since 2002.
See http://web.mit.edu/professional/summer/courses/computer/6.18s.html. 
This tutorial will be third in a series of successful tutorials as follows:

1. Dov Dori, Object-Process Methodology and Its Application to the Visual Semantic Web. 22nd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2003), Chicago Illinois, October 13-16, 2003.

2. Dov Dori, Object-Process Methodology: Ontological Foundations and Internet Applications. 5th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, École Supérieure d' Électronique de l' Ouest, Angers, France, 23-26 April, 2003.

Potential Attendees and Background Knowledge

The target audience includes information technology professionals interested in modeling software systems. Specifically, analysts, designers, modelers, database administrators and system integrators, executives, and project leaders will benefit from attending the tutorial and applying OPM for the purpose of developing better systems faster and more reliably. Background knowledge in object technology is helpful but not mandatory.

Outline

OPM ontology: Objects, processes, states, and how they relate. Object-Process Diagrams and Object-Process Language, transformations and state transitions, enablers, transformees, fundamental structural relations: aggregation, characterization, generalization and Inheritance, classification-instantiation, complexity management, abstraction and refinement mechanisms, system lifecycle. Semantic Web and Visual Semantic Web: The human-machine language orientation dilemma, graphic knowledge representation, human vs. machine understanding and language readability, the Semantic Web and the RDF Syntax, The Visual Semantic Web Schema, Namespace Specification in VSW using OPM, Summary.

Reading

The main textbook on which the tutorial is based is: Dori, D. Object-Process Methodology: A Holistic Systems Paradigm. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 2002. The book includes a CD with OPCAT 2. A recent version of OPCAT (Version 2.52 or higher, see www.objectProcess.org) will serve for demonstration of OPM principles and applications during the tutorial and will be given away to the attendees free of charge.

About the Presenter

Dov Dori is Head of the Information Systems Engineering Area at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and Research Affiliate at MIT. Between 1999-2001 he was Visiting Faculty at MIT's Engineering Systems Division and Sloan School of Management. Professor Dori received his B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Technion in 1975, M.Sc. in Operations Research from Tel Aviv University in 1981, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, in 1988. Between 1978 and 1984 he was Chief Industrial Engineer of MERKAVA Tank Production Plant, and between 1996 and 1998 he was Head of Technion's Area of Information Systems Engineering. His research interests include Systems Development Methodologies, Information Systems Engineering, Computer-Aided Software Engineering and Document Analysis and Recognition. Dov Dori has developed the Machine Drawing Understanding System (MDUS) and Object-Process Methodology (OPM), for which he won several prizes. In 1999-2001 Prof. Dori was Associate Editor of IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI). In 1997-2003 he was Associate Editor of International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition. Currently he is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (IJPRAI) and International Journal of Web Engineering Technologies (IJWET). He is author/co-editor of four books and author of over 130 publications. He is Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and Senior Member of IEEE. He has been consultant and invited lecturer for companies, including Pratt and Whitney Canada, Ford Motor Company, FAA, NASA, The MITRE Corporation, Draper Laboratories, Kodak, and others.

Selected Pertinent References

1. Dov Dori, Object-Process Methodology - A Holistic Systems Paradigm, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, New York, 2002 (ISBN 3-540-65471-2; Hardcover). http://130.113.156.29/home/trade/booklists/e.acgi?A3-540-65471-2amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3540654712/booksnewasin/302-6670724-1913628
2. Dov Dori, Object-Process Analysis: Maintaining the Balance between System Structure and Behavior. Journal of Logic and Computation, 5, 2, pp. 227-249, 1995.
3. Mor Peleg and Dov Dori, The Model Multiplicity Problem: Experimenting with Real-Time Specification Methods. IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering, 26, 8, pp. 742-759, 2000. http://iew3.technion.ac.il:8080/Home/Users/dori/Model_Multiplicity_Paper.pdf
4. Dov Dori, Object-Process Methodology Applied to Modeling Credit Card Transactions. Journal of Database Management, 12, 1, pp. 2-12, 2001. http://iew3.technion.ac.il:8080/Home/Users/dori/JDM-Dori-OPM.pdf
5. Iris Reinhartz-Berger, Dov Dori, and Shmuel Katz, OPM/Web - Object-Process Methodology for Developing Web Applications. Annals of Software Engineering 13, pp. 141-161. 2002.