How UML models and ontologies can complement each other

Software & Systems Modeling, vol. 25, pp. 635–637

Abstract

A common understanding of ontologies is that an ontology is a structured framework used to organize information and knowledge in a specific domain.It defines concepts, categories, properties, and relationships in a way that both humans and computers can understand.Typical ontological components include concepts (or classes), instances (or individuals), properties describing characteristics, and relationships between concepts as well as between instances (e.g., a "Person" has a "birthdate" and "Konrad Zuse" is an instance of "Person" and has his birthdate on "June, 22").Practical applications demonstrate that ontologies can be successfully used in a variety of domains, such as artificial intelligence, the semantic web, enterprise architecture, or information retrieval, often in the form of knowledge graphs.This makes them particularly attractive when the goal is to capture, share, and reason about domain knowledge.When comparing the language constructs, the ontology approach is very closely related both to UML class diagrams and to MOF-based metamodels.However, in both cases expressibility, but in particular their purposes differ to a large extent.It is therefore worthwhile to compare both individually.

Authors 4

1. Marsha Chechik

   University of Toronto

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

2. Benoît Combemale

   Université de Rennes

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Rennes, Rennes, France

3. Jeff Gray

   University of Alabama

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

4. Bernhard Rumpe⋆ corresponding Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany