Supporting interoperability using the Discrete-event Modeling Ontology (DeMO)

In modeling and simulation, the need for interoperability can be between simulation models or, more broadly, within simulation environments. For example, simulation of biochemical pathways for glycan biosynthesis will need access to glycomics knowledge bases such as the GlycO, EnzyO and ReactO ontologies and bioinformatics resource/databases. Traditionally, developers have studied these information sources and written custom simulation code with hardlinks into, for example, databases. Our research explores a technique which allows developers to create a conceptual model using domain ontologies, and then use alignment and mapping information between the domain ontologies and the Discrete-event Modeling Ontology (DeMO) to create DeMO instances which represent a model that conforms to a particular simulation world view. Once the DeMO instances have been created, a code generator can be used to produce an executable simulation model. This paper discusses several situations in which DeMO can support interoperability but focuses primarily on interoperability between domain ontologies and DeMO.