Ontology derived conceptual modeling for simulation

Abstract

An ontology is one of the way to represent domain knowledge into a human-understandable and machine readable format. Meanwhile, an ontology in simulation has been used as a conceptual model to explicitly describes the modelers’ perspective of the domain. This study proposes a rigorous method that systematically extracts domain concepts, synthesizes processes within the domain and build an ontology for simulation modelling - a Minimal-Viable Simulation Ontology (MVSimO). MVSimO can be viewed as a derived conceptual model that supports modelling and simulation through abstraction and simplification of the domain. The novel approach presented curates the modelers’ perspective of the real-world by extracting concepts from existing knowledge and synthesizes the processes involved (demonstrated in A&E departments). The effectiveness of this method is reviewed by comparing MVSimO ontological model to the existing model. Evaluation results are encouraging, providing possibilities to improve an ontology for simulation when access to experts is limited.