Converting UML to OWL Ontology

Question

I am trying to develop an OWL ontology based on different UML file resources presented in XMI format. Reading through the internet for a while now, it seems that almost all the available tools or approaches are outdated and even when trying some of them they don't provide the expected outcome. Since this ontology plays a really important role in our project, I wanted to know what is the best approachs/tools to be used in order to convert UML to OWL ?

Eponymous

Answer 1

I have looked into this myself as well and I have found no tools that can do this satisfactory. Problems I ran into were either the tools used an old version of UML, did not support all UML features, used OWL 1 rather than OWL 2 and was supported by only an old version of Protege.

I resorted by doing the translation by hand, which for most UML constructs are not too difficult. For this purpose I have done a write-up on UML vs OWL, which gives an intuitive explanation for why some of the translation is done in a certain why, as well as provide a reference for translating UML to OWL.

Update Nov 2023

I have started with a tool for doing translation. Currently it assumes .tsv input files, but I aim to extend it with support for XMI.

Apprehensive

thank you for your answer. I think the only approach left for me is to to the translation by hand. If i understand you right, I need to follow the rules you specified in your paper or the rules specified hier (pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2605/…) and to create an Ontology from scratch using Protege for example ? – Eponymous

That is correct! And it is not that difficult. Though it might be error prone because you forget to specify some axiom - at least that is what happened to me. – Apprehensive

Answer 2

There's an OMG spec now available at https://www.omg.org/spec/MOF2RDF/

I haven't yet found an open-source tool implementing this directly (i.e. convert from UML/XMI to OWL/RDF), but there are EMF related activities, that may be relevant (haven't tried), e.g.: https://github.com/ghillairet/emftriple

Infallible

Answer 3

You'll probably never get exactly what you want unless you do it by hand, as Henriette mentioned. One viable option is using COGS, which I've found to work pretty well.

The catch is that it's related to Rot's answer by supporting the OMG specification. If it's not much work to make sure that your UML conforms to that specification, it may save some time in the long run. Here's an example of an OWL file produced by COGS.

Clinton