A case study in applying ontologies to augment and reason about the correctness of specifications

In this paper we investigate how software specifications can benefit from the presence of formal ontologies to augment and enrich their context. This makes it possible to verify the correctness of the specification with respect to formally represented domain knowledge. We present a meta-interpretation technique that allows us to perform checks for conceptual error occurrences in specifications. We illustrate this approach through a case study: we augmented an existing formal specification presented by Luqi & Cooke with a formal ontology produced by the Information Sciences Institute at USC, the AIRCRAFT ontology. In addition, we explore how we can build and use application specific ontological constraints to detect conceptual errors in specifications.