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Software is often delivered late, over budget, prone to errors, and at risk of serious negative outcomes. This article presents the successful delivery of a digital solution for the Belgian Railways, from requirements specification to roll-out in the cloud. This was achieved using an ontology centric software development and execution platform (ODASE) combining OWL-RDF ontologies and Semantic Rules based on SWRL with extensions.

Semantic web technologies enable a clear separation between the Business “what” and the IT “how”. This is achieved using SWRL with OWL and RDF, thereby formalizing the business logic declaratively. To tackle real-world problems, SWRL must be extended with existentials, aggregates and NAF. This extended SWRL must use a syntax which is easily understood by business experts.

Software is often delivered late, over budget, prone to errors, and at risk of serious negative outcomes. This article presents the successful delivery of a digital solution for the Belgian Railways, from requirements specification to roll-out in the cloud. This was achieved using an ontology centric software development and execution platform (ODASE) combining OWL-RDF ontologies and Semantic Rules based on SWRL with extensions.

The ODASE approach provides a solid approach to building reliable, ethical software. Being ‘reliable’ and ‘ethical’ in this case means that the software assembled around the ODASE executable business model will return explainable results that use the appropriate business information in ways that follow the business rules and the appropriate consequential inferences of both the modelled data and these rules. 

The failure rate for the creation of critical and agile Information Systems (IS) is striking. Public sector examples include NHS in the UK and Louvois in France. However, the situation in the private sector is no different. Various approaches have been proposed by software professionals with limited success. At the same time, the use of logic — the ‘mathematics of software’ — has been abandoned in favour of ‘coding’ alone, nor has its application been put to good use for comm

Michel Vanden Bossche and Ian MacLarty explore in this article the potential of three new W3C standards defined for the Semantic Web: Web Ontology Language (OWL), Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL), and Resource Description Framework (RDF). They allow the creation of an ontology, a model of a system that is compact and practical for use by programmer analysts working with business analysts.