Enabling Distributed Model Management Using Semantic Web Technologies

In today's increasingly dynamic and competitive business environment, organizations strive to leverage their information resources to gain and sustain competitive advantage. Decision models as knowledge objects encapsulating problem situations, as well as means for leveraging information stored in corporate data warehouses, have positioned such models as an organizational resource that need to be managed, shared and re-used. Recent developments in distributed information technologies and the increasing reliance on such technologies by organization requires that model management accommodates today's distribute infrastructure landscape.In this paper, we leverage recent developments in semantic web technologies to enable model management functions in a distributed and heterogeneous environment. The proposed architecture leverages OWL to represent models at various levels of abstraction as well as pertinent problem domain, OWL-S to semantically annotate decision models represented as web services, and SWRL to facilitate model querying. Model selection and composition are used to illustrate the applicability of the architecture to model management functions in a distributed setting.