Extending the Unified Modeling Language for ontology development

Abstract. There is rapidly growing momentum for web enabled agents that reason about and dynamically integrate the appropriate knowledge and services at run-time. The dynamic integration of knowledge and services depends on the existence of explicit declarative semantic models (ontologies). We have been building tools for ontology development based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). This allows the many mature UML tools, models and expertise to be applied to knowledge representation systems, not only for visualizing complex ontologies but also for managing the ontology development process. UML has many features, such as profiles, global modularity and extension mechanisms that are not generally available in most ontology languages. However, ontology languages have some features that UML does not support. Our paper identifies the similarities and differences (with examples) between UML and the ontology languages RDF and DAML+OIL. To reconcile these differences, we propose a modific...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: SOSYM
• Authors: Kenneth Baclawski, Mieczyslaw M. Kokar, Paul A. Kogut, Lewis Hart, Jeffrey E. Smith, Jerzy Letkowski, Pat Emery
• Keywords: Ontology, Ontology Development, Ontology Languages, SOSYM 2002