Ontologies allow researchers, domain experts, and software agents to share a common understanding of the concepts and relationships of a domain. The past few years have seen the publication of ontologies for a large number of domains. The modeling and simulation community is beginning to see potential for using these ontologies in the modeling process. This paper presents a method for using the knowledge encoded in ontologies to facilitate the development of simulation models. It suggests a technique that establishes relationships between domain ontologies and a modeling ontology and then uses the relationships to instantiate a simulation model as ontology instances. Techniques for translating these instances into XML based markup languages and then into executable models for various software packages are also presented.
Gregory A. Silver, Osama Al-Haj Hassan, John A. Mi