Towards using OWL DL as a metamodelling framework for ATL

Ontologies have become increasingly relevant to the modelling community, providing a knowledgebase to support several software engineering activities. As such, several efforts have been made to integrate ontology technology with modelling technology. This has resulted in the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM), which allows model transformation languages to interact directly with ontologies. The ODM limits itself to data structure, however, and does not integrate the reasoning capabilities within ontologies. Therefore, we have done an experiment with an OWL DL driver for ATL, where ATL has direct access to the reasoning capabilities of the OWL DL ontology language. OWL DL is used as a metamodelling framework, where OWL classes serve as metaclasses and OWL individuals serve as model elements. The envisioned benefits are optimisation possibilities through automatic classification, and static analysis of ATL transformations written using OWL DL expressions. This paper will discuss our findings so far regarding these two envisioned benefits.