On Ontologology

The study of models, and related concepts such as metamodels, islargely situated within the software engineering community under thebanner of model-driven development. Yet these concepts have some obviousparallels with concepts developed within the articial intelligencecommunity under the banners of ontologies and the semantic web. Althougha considerable amount of work has been done that aims to relatethe development of ontologies to the model-driven development of software,the place of bidirectional transformations within these connectedworlds is (almost) unstudied. Yet, experts in the study of ontologieshave experienced the need to check and restore consistency, and havedeveloped techniques, terminology and tools that relate to these tasks.In this paper we provide a high-level introduction to the work that hasbeen done, aiming to promote further study and perhaps collaborationbetween these communities.