Ontology is a comprehensive knowledge model which enables the developer to practice a “higher” level of reuse of knowledge. Typically, different modeling languages are employed in different phases of software development of a knowledge-based system. In order to achieve knowledge instead of software reuse, we propose forging a closer mapping between the knowledge and software models in the development process. In this paper, we first present an ontology developed and then investigate UML as an ontology modeling tool to facilitate the mapping from knowledge model to software model. To illustrate the integrated modeling approach using UML, we applied it to develop an ontology for the domain of selecting a remediation technique for petroleum contaminated sites. Keywords Ontology, Knowledge Reuse, Unified Modeling Language (UML)
Xin Wang, Christine W. Chan