S. Steyskal, M. Wimmer: Leveraging SemanticWeb Technologies for Consistency Management in Multi-Viewpoint Systems Engineering, in Semantic Web for Intelligent Engineering Applications, S. Biffl, R. Sabou (Hrg.); Springer, 2016, pages 1 - 24. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-41490-4_13
Systems modeling is an important ingredient for engineering complex systems in potentially heterogeneous environments. One way to deal with the increasing complexity of systems is to offer several dedicated viewpoints on the system model for different stakeholders, thus providing means for system engineers to focus on particular aspects of the environment. This allows them to solve engineering tasks more efficiently, although keeping those multiple viewpoints consistent with each other (e.g., in dynamic multiuser scenarios) is not trivial. In the present chapter, we elaborate how Semantic Web technologies (SWT) may be utilized to deal with such challenges when models are represented as RDF graphs. In particular, we discuss current developments regarding a W3C Recommendation for describing structural constraints over RDF graphs called Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) which we subsequently exploit for defining intermodel constraints to ensure consistency between different viewpoints represented as RDF graphs. Based on a running example, we illustrate how SHACL is used to define correspondences (i.e., mappings) between different RDF graphs and subsequently how those correspondences can be validated during modeling time.