Modelling and Reasoning in Metamodelling Enabled Ontologies

Ontologies are expected to play an important role in many application domains, as well as in software engineering in general. One problem with using ontologies within software engineering is that while UML, a widely used standard for specifying and constructing the models for a software-intensive system, has a four-layer metamodelling architecture, the standard Web Ontology Language (OWL) does not support reasoning over layered metamodels. OWL 2 provides simple metamodelling by using a punning approach, however, the interpretation function is different based on the context, which leads to non-intuitive results. The OWL FA Language has a well defined metamodelling architecture. However, there is no study and tool for supporting reasoning over OWL FA. In this paper, we discuss some reasoning tasks in OWL FA. We also introduce the OWL FA Tool kit, a simple tool kit for manipulating and reasoning with OWL FA.