Prof. Dr. Colin Atkinson

"Models versus Ontologies - what's the difference and where does it matter?"

As models and ontologies assume an increasingly central role in enterprise systems engineering the question of how they compare and can be used together assumes growing importance. On the one hand, the semantic web / knowledge engineering community is increasingly promoting ontologies as the key to better software engineering methods, while on the other hand the software engineering community is enthusiastically pursuing the vision of Model Driven Development as the core solution. Superficially, however, ontologies and models are very similar, and in fact are often visualized using the same language (e.g. UML). So what's going on? Are models and ontologies basically the same thing sold from two different viewpoints or is there some fundamental difference between them beyond the idiosyncrasies of current tools and languages? If so, what is this different and how should one choose which technology to use for which purpose?