  The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published several recommendations for
building and storing ontologies, including the most recent OWL 2 Web Ontology
Language (OWL). These initiatives have been followed by practical
implementations that popularize OWL in various domains. For example, OWL has
been used for conceptual modeling in industrial engineering, and its reasoning
facilities are used to provide a wealth of services, e.g. model diagnosis,
automated code generation, and semantic integration. More specifically, recent
studies have shown that OWL is well suited for harmonizing information of
engineering tools stored as AutomationML (AML) files. However, OWL and its
tools can be cumbersome for direct use by engineers such that an ontology
expert is often required in practice. Although much attention has been paid in
the literature to overcome this issue by transforming OWL ontologies from/to
AML models automatically, dealing with OWL complex classes remains an open
research question. In this paper, we introduce the AML concept models for
representing OWL complex classes in AutomationML, and present algorithms for
the bidirectional translation between OWL complex classes and their
corresponding AML concept models. We show that this approach provides an
efficient and intuitive interface for nonexperts to visualize, modify, and
create OWL complex classes.
