Object-Process Methodology and Its Application to the Visual Semantic Web Dov Dori   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Tutorials Abstract A comprehensive system modeling methodology with coherent ontology is essential for system architecting and engineering. Object-Process Methodology is a unifying approach for developing, communicating, supporting and evolving systems of various domains, types, magnitudes and complexities. OPM is founded on well-defined ontology with solid infrastructure; it has clear, formal, single-model semantics expressed bi-modally via graphics and natural language. It enables fast and reliable system modeling; and it caters to domain experts who are not IT professionals and therefore enables them to actively engage in the development process as part of the team. Taught at leading institutions of higher education and used in Industry, OPM has evolved as a significant extension of Object technology which caters equally well to systems' structure (through objects and relations) and behavior (through processes that transform objects). OPM encompasses the entire lifecycle of a software system or product, from concept and initiation through development to deployment. The Visual Semantic Web (VSW) is a new paradigm for enhancing the current Semantic Web technology. VSW, which is based on OPM, provides for representation of knowledge over the Web in a unified way that caters to human perceptions while also being machine-processable. The advantages of the VSW approach include graphic-text knowledge representation, visual navigability, semantic sentence interpretation, specification of system dynamics, and complexity management. This tutorial will present the underlying OPM ontology and its application for the Visual Semantic Web. It is based in part on material I have been teaching at MIT's Engineering Systems Division as well as the Summer Professional Institute. ©2005 Association for Computing Machinery