From Rule Engines to Ontologies: An OWL 2 DL Approach for Domain-Specific Evaluation Information Systems

Domain-specific information systems often maintain their data model, rule base, and application infrastructure as separate artifacts, complicating maintenance and pre-deployment verification. This study investigates whether these artifacts can be unified in a verifiable ontology-to-code pipeline without changing the expected classifications. The proposed Model-Driven Architecture uses the Business Application Builder framework and a Web Ontology Language 2 Description Logic ontology to represent domain structure, classification rules, and generation metadata. HermiT verifies consistency, satisfiability, and subsumption under open-world semantics before code generation. The generator produces persistence, business-logic, data-transfer, and presentation layers, while the generated Java application evaluates stored records under closed-world semantics and resolves overlapping categories using ontology-declared priorities. In a Serbian research-evaluation case study, the generated system reproduced the M30 and M33 classifications of an established Jess implementation. An internal secondary experiment generated and executed a prenatal-diagnosis application; all six runtime classifications matched the HermiT entailments and expected outcomes. The public artifact independently reproduces the ontology-level experiments but excludes the proprietary generator and generated source code. The results support the feasibility of ontology-driven generation for static-classification systems, whereas arithmetic risk computation and temporal event processing remain better suited to complementary procedural technologies. No performance superiority is claimed.

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Publication Details

Journal
Computers
Published
2026-08-20
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/computers15080544
Primary Topic
Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques
Type
article
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article

From Rule Engines to Ontologies: An OWL 2 DL Approach for Domain-Specific Evaluation Information Systems

Borivoj Bogdanović, Siniša Nikolić
Computers
Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques
article

From Rule Engines to Ontologies: An OWL 2 DL Approach for Domain-Specific Evaluation Information Systems

Borivoj Bogdanović, Siniša Nikolić
article en

Abstract

Domain-specific information systems often maintain their data model, rule base, and application infrastructure as separate artifacts, complicating maintenance and pre-deployment verification. This study investigates whether these artifacts can be unified in a verifiable ontology-to-code pipeline without changing the expected classifications. The proposed Model-Driven Architecture uses the Business Application Builder framework and a Web Ontology Language 2 Description Logic ontology to represent domain structure, classification rules, and generation metadata. HermiT verifies consistency, satisfiability, and subsumption under open-world semantics before code generation. The generator produces persistence, business-logic, data-transfer, and presentation layers, while the generated Java application evaluates stored records under closed-world semantics and resolves overlapping categories using ontology-declared priorities. In a Serbian research-evaluation case study, the generated system reproduced the M30 and M33 classifications of an established Jess implementation. An internal secondary experiment generated and executed a prenatal-diagnosis application; all six runtime classifications matched the HermiT entailments and expected outcomes. The public artifact independently reproduces the ontology-level experiments but excludes the proprietary generator and generated source code. The results support the feasibility of ontology-driven generation for static-classification systems, whereas arithmetic risk computation and temporal event processing remain better suited to complementary procedural technologies. No performance superiority is claimed.

ComputersVol. 15(8)
Singidunum University (RS), University of Novi Sad (RS)
Industry, innovation and infrastructure
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques
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