Align Stereotypes Service

[claudenirmf]

Two common problems in the migration of older OntoUML ontologies are (i) the inconsistent spelling of stereotypes in the original ontology (e.g., «subkind», «subKind», and «sub kind»), and (ii) the usage of stereotypes that must be mapped to a version adopted more recently (e.g., «powertype», «high-order type», and «type»).

This issue concerns the creation of an "alignment service" that receives a given ontology and returns it with corrected stereotypes on all elements. These corrections are limited to misspelled and mapped stereotypes. Stereotypes that cannot match some of the current OntoUML stereotypes in one of these two ways shall be left as is.

One other correction that may be considered in this context is the inversion of association directions to the direction prescribed by OntoUML. For instance, an association decorated with the stereotype «mediation» may only be defined with the relator at its source, and not a substantial. However, this is could be considered a modification that is too invasive, or even unintuitive to the user.