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umlowlsemantic-webontologyxmi

Converting UML to OWL Ontology


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 Reading through the internet for a while now, it seems that almost all the available tools or approaches are outdated and even when trying some of them they don't provide the expected outcome.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 ?


Solution

  • 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.