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

Abstract

The 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 explicitation language adopted by a great community of users like the principal language of knowledge representation. The bringing 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 usable OWL ontology from UML class diagrams. The transformation is based on transformation rules make it possible to achieve our aim. This approach is illustrated by an example.