Interoperable Petri net models via ontology

Abstract

The paper presents a Petri net infrastructure that should allow sharing Petri nets on the Semantic Web. Previous solutions only provide model interchange mechanisms between Petri net tools. The Petri net ontology is a central part of our solution. The ontology is closely related to the Petri Net Markup Language (PNML) - an ongoing Petri net community sharing effort. We developed the Petri net ontology using both UML and the Protégé tool, whereas we use RDF and OWL to represent the ontology. We implemented a Petri net software tool - P3 - that can be used to convert the Petri net ontology compliant models to the formats of current Petri net tools (e.g., DaNAMiCS, Petri Net Kernel, PIPE) using extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). In order to show how the ontology can be used, we developed a simple educational web application that uses RDF-annotated ontology-based Petri net learning materials.