Ontology-driven conceptual modeling as a service

In the past decades, the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) has played an important role in supporting the development of ontologies in academic and business settings, being employed to represent widely diverse domains. In this period, a dedicated community of researchers has worked to support UFO and its representation language, OntoUML, by creating the OntoUML Lightweight Editor (OLED). Now that a new version of OntoUML is available, the need for up-to-date tool support has exposed the limitations of OLED, its development context, and the difficulties of bringing research contributions to the hands of modelers. To tackle these issues, this paper reflects upon the experiences of this community taking into consideration the goals of researchers (as developers) and modelers to devise a new microserviceoriented modeling infrastructure for OntoUML, called OntoUML as a Service (OaaS). This infrastructure supports future practical contributions to the language with a focus on lowering the entry barrier for the development new contributions and enabling an easier deployment to modelers. The paper also discusses the details of implementing OaaS through a number of projects that currently implement this infrastructure.