From UML to ready-to-use OWL ontologies

Abstract

This paper presents an eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT)-based approach for automatic generation of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) from an UML model. Similar solutions that treat this problem are mostly partial because do not use full metamodel potentials. They only show UML, usability for ontology development, its transformations into Semantic Web languages (e.g. RDF Schema, DAML, DAML+OIL), but its models must be further refined using ontology-specialized tool. None of these approaches enables instance modeling and generation of OWL. Here we show an architecture that consists of: the Ontology Definition Metamodel defined using Meta Object Facility (MOF)-based on the OWL, as well as the related Ontology UML Profile (OUP). A transformation, we present here, extends this metamodeling architecture and transforms an ontology from its OUP definition (i.e. XML Metadata Interchange - XMI) into OWL description. Accordingly, we illustrate how an OUP-developed ontology can be shared with ontological engineering tools (i.e. Protege).