Towards an Ontology for Network Management: Analysis and Refinement

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we build an ontology for a simplified network management system; to our knowledge, no attempts have been made using OntoUML or UFO based approaches. Second, we propose a refinement approach for ontologies specified in OntoUML. This refinement approach allows us to avoid some of the pitfalls of inheritance as used in “classic” object-oriented specification and programming in general and in OntoUML in particular. Our refinement approach is illustrated through its application to the proposed network management system ontology.