Ontology validation in OPAL

The incredible flexibility and openness provided by the Internet to connect computer systems does not match with a similar possibility to connect software applications. In the future, software applications will not be built as we do today. An application will be implemented as a dynamic aggregation of software services (web services). In this perspective, ontologies represent a promising solution to support the development of a new generation of software applications, suited for interoperability among different enterprises. However, the construction of an Enterprise Ontology (EO) is a long and costly task, that requires expert ontology engineers. To support this task, the OPAL (Object, Process, Actor modeling Language) methodology has been proposed. The core of OPAL is an enterprise ontology framework that, similarly to the framework approach proposed in Software Engineering, supplies to the ontology engineer a few basic guidelines to ease and validate the construction of an EO.