Common Tool Ontology

Introduction

The common ontology for tools captures tool related metadata and constitutes an ontology-driven evolution of the metadata in the Tools Repository. A high level view of the ontology is shown in the following diagram.

The diagram shows the main concepts in the ontology. The concept Person Info is shared with the common ontology for shapes and captures information regarding a person that is in some way (creating, ownership, uploading, etc.) associated with the various tools that are stored in the repository.

The central concept in the ontology is Software Tool, which describes the various tools that are stored in the repository. A tool can be associated with other tools, through the relation requiresTool. It has a specific functionality, specified by the concept Functionality, and it may implement one or more Algorithms.

A tool can be further related to a Compilation Platform, under which it can be operated, and has several Software Releases. Finally, each tool accepts specific input and provides specific output. The input and output of a tool can be one or more shapes, which are described by the concept Shape Info, and which are associated with a specific Shape Type.

Software Tool constitutes the base concept in the ontology which is further extended by related concepts defined in the domain ontologies. A tool in the ontology can be further specialized to the concepts of a Library, a Macro, a Plugin, and an Independent Application, as shown in the following figure. The most important properties of a tool are also shown in the associated text sheet.

The Shape Type hierarchy

The Shape Type hierarchy captures information regarding the type of shapes that can be processed by a tool or constitute the output of such processing.

The Functionality hierarchy

The Functionality hierarchy is used to define the functionality of an Algorithm or a Software Tool.