UML Class Diagrams to OWL Ontologies: A Graph Transformation based Approach

Abstract

Models are placed by modeling paradigm at the center of development process. These models are represented by languages, like UML the language standardized by the OMG which became necessary for development. Moreover the ontology engineering paradigm places ontologies at the center of development process, in this paradigm we find OWL (the description language adopted by a great community of users) the principal language for knowledge representation. The bridging between UML and OWL appeared on several regards such as the classes and associations. In this paper, we propose an approach based graph transformation and registered in the MDA architecture for the automatic generation of OWL ontologies from UML class diagrams. The transformation is based on transformation rules; the level of abstraction in these rules is close to the application in order to have usable ontologies.