Toward Ontology-Based Component Composition

Large-scale component-based software systems are becoming increasingly important. Building such a system requires more than just specifications for the overall system and its components. It is necessary to have a formal specification of how the components are composed to form the overall system. Furthermore, it is also necessary to have an explicit specification of the environment within which the system will be used. Finally, some mechanism must be available to make verification a tractable problem. To address all of these concerns, we suggest that component composition can be based on ontologies. An ontology is a shared understanding that allows individuals in a community to communicate. The increasing popularity of ontology-based computing has resulted in a rapid increase in the number of tools available for creating and for using ontologies. We suggest that leveraging these tools can improve the coverage and effectiveness of component composition compared with existing techniques. We also discuss a specific application domain that can be used as a testbed for the use of ontology-based techniques to achieve dynamic reconfiguration performed at run-time without direct human interaction.