An Ontology Driven Information System

In the era of coalescing application landscapes a big potential for defining, implementing, disseminating and using ontologies is evolving. Whenever a software development project is not just concerned with a specific application but is part of a landscape of projects located in different domains, an ontology-driven approach may be worth considering and even be advantageous as compared to a traditional approach. One principal goal of this approach is to extend the idea of reuse from the modelling to implementation level. Instead of building systems right from the scratch or from the ready-made components which are plugged together such as hardware modules, ontologies are reusable model components from which particular implementations can be derived for any domain specific application . In this paper, the conceptual modeling is practiced as an Object Oriented Software Engineering and is mapped with the ontology approach to devise Ontology Driven Software Engineering approach. The resultant life cycle models various Ontology Driven Information Systems from different domains such as Expert Systems, Decision Support Systems and Process Control Systems etc. Finally, some perspectives of an Ontology Driven Software Engineering approach are outlined.