Domain-of-Discourse Model

The Domain-of-Discourse Model specifies the objects of the conversation and their relations. The idea of such a Domain-of-Discourse Model is not new, a similar approach is used by Agent Communication Languages like FIPA-ACL [Lab01, GC09]. The Domain-of-Discourse Model is the subset of an ontology needed for the conversation. The Domain-of-Discourse Model consists of the structure of and the relation between the domain objects.

To capture this information, an ecore model is used. In some cases the definition of the predefined ecore data types, which are basically the same as the UML data types, is not precise enough to capture all information of an object’s attribute. An example of such a lack of detailed type of information is the date attribute of a flight. A date data type can be used to either define a date, a date and a time or only a time. To solve this problem, elements in the Domain-of-Discourse Model can be annotated with additional type information.