From domain ontologies to modeling ontologies to executable simulation models

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.