An Ontology-Oriented Approach to Represent and Compare the Functional Behaviour of Event-Based Systems

Abstract

Representing the functional behaviour of a system is a critical practice in any engineering discipline. However, how to compare and reason about the represented systems has mostly been dependent on our cognitive processing ability. An effective representation must support machine-assisted reasoning mechanism as well as human intuitions. We present an effective, ontology-oriented formal approach of representation that is designed to be both machine-processable and human comprehensible. Based on the theory of events and change in AI-based commonsense reasoning and the notion of affordances, we developed a novel approach to functional reasoning which is more intuitive and practical compared to the existing formal systems of representation. After discussing the notion of ontologies along with their implementation formalisms, we present our representational facility called the Event-Based Functional Behaviour Ontology (EFBO). A detailed overview of the EFBO is presented along with our own approach to behaviour modelling. As a special application, we present and demonstrate the EFBO-based validation system that can be used to validate the levels of functional consistencies between cross-platform systems. We also discuss the commonsense reasoning theories relevant to our representation along with other related work. Finally, we discuss the broader perspectives of our contributions within the context of modern computing and software engineering.