The OTTER Project was first presented at IC3K 2011 in Paris, France, during the joint session with KEOD 2011 chaired by Dr. Jan L. G. Dietz, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. As an invited paper, the OTTER Project was published by Springer in Knowledge Discover, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management in 2013 titled: “Enterprise Architecture Executable Patterns: Enterprise Architecture – Replacing Models with Executable Patterns”.
The KEOD presentation gave an Enterprise Architecture view of the application of OWL for building application systems. The presentation included ontology layers and the execution of services following the SCA and SDO standards.
This was the first release of the OtterServer prototype. This release operated as a plug-in to the Protégé editor and provided an HTTP server for access to services. It only contained minimal content visualization.
In its current release, the OtterServer operates as a standalone server using an embedded Jetty server with WebSocket for service communications. The Service Data Object standard access and update capabilities are implemented with a graph database for persistence and ACID transaction updates. The graph database was designed specifically to support the OWL class expression as a graph query language. Content visualization of ontologies and services has been extended and enhanced using D3.js and Graphviz.