Aligning ontology-based development with service oriented systems

This paper argues for placing ontologies at the centre of the software development life cycle for distributed component-based systems and, in particular, for service-oriented systems. It presents an ontology-based development process which relies on three levels of abstraction using ontologies: architecture layer, application layer and domain layer. The paper discusses the key roles of ontologies with respect to the various abstraction layers and their corresponding impact on the concomitant workproducts. In addition, a peer-to-peer-based service selecting and composing tool is suggested as a way of supporting the process. The paper presents the architecture of the proposed tool and illustrates the whole process in the development of a mobile banking application based on dynamic Web services.