A semantic mapping to provide an accurate definition of RAL has been performed. We have chosen Description Logics (DLs) as the semantic domain for the mapping because of two reasons:
- On the one hand, the definition of an organizational structure fits nicely into the way DLs expresses its concepts and, hence, DLs provide a very natural way to describe the problem.
- On the other hand, DL is best known for providing a logical formalism for ontologies and the semantic web. As a matter of fact, the semantics of the W3C recommendation OWL 2 to express ontologies for the semantic web is defined in DL. Consequently, there is a plethora of DL reasoners available that can be used to automatically analyse the RAL expressions efficiently.
In this section, several mappings to build a RAL ontology can be found, specifically: