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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.

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.