Procedural extensions for executable ontologies in conventional software development

Ontologies have gone lengths in various areas of knowledge engineering, yet they are falling short of reaching an equal position as formal domain models in the landscape of enterprise software development. In this paper, we present an approach for integrating ontologies into the code space of conventional software. We argue that the limited adoption of ontologies in software development is partially due to the lack of imperative programming capabilities. We propose extending ontologies with procedural extensions by expressing them in an executable form. Finally, we discuss the advantages of this representation and the possibilities for further improvements.