Digital Semantics for Enterprise Information Systems Development

Introduction: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most important paradigm shift of our time. Its purpose is to simulate human intelligence inside a machine, and it’s already affecting many aspects of our life. The core of AI research concerns defining solutions to get, understand, store and elaborate digital inputs in order to return results: solutions to think like a human being. Our contribution is a position paper about our vision and ideas on this topic. Our proposal is additional to current AI approaches: it aims to integrate the path of knowledge and development of AI. Methods: the literature on AI regarding proposals, approaches and models is vast and encompasses an enormous number of application domains. Our research goal is to propose a paradigm to simulate human intelligence within a computer, limited to the Enterprise Information System (EIS) domain, by means of automata and ontologies. Nowadays automata are used in Software Engineering to manage decision-making processes and control the information flow within a software system. The term “ontology” has several meanings, depending on the discipline and domain. In the EIS domain, by "ontology" we mean a set of concepts and relationships that represent a knowledge area. We propose the Digital Semantics (DS), a novel paradigm and definition to our knowledge. DS is the proposed solution to define ontologies, which in turn will have to be implemented through automata. To reach this goal, we answer 3 Research Questions (RQs): (RQ1) Is it possible to define Digital Semantics as a metamodel based on the semantics of natural languages? (RQ2) Is it possible to define ontologies with Digital Semantics? (RQ3) Can automata be the solution to implement ontologies defined with Digital Semantics? Conclusions: the aim of the paper is to answer to the RQs and obtain feedback from the international scientific community.