Extending the Unified Modeling Language for ontology development |
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Authors: | Kenneth Baclawski Mieczyslaw K Kokar Paul A Kogut Lewis Hart Jeffrey Smith Jerzy Letkowski Pat Emery |
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Affiliation: | (1) Lockheed Martin Management and Data Systems, PO Box 8048, Philadelphia, PA 19101, USA, US;(2) Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA; E-mail: kenb@ccs.neu.edu, US;(3) Mercury Computer Systems, 199 Riverneck Road, Chelmsford, Massachusetts 01824-2820, USA, US;(4) Western New England College, 1215 Wilbraham Road, Springfield, Massachusetts 01119, USA, US;(5) AT&T Government Solutions Inc., 1900 Gallow Road, Vienna, Virginia 22182, USA, US |
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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 modification
to the UML metamodel to address some of the most problematic differences. One of these is the ontological concept variously
called a property, relation or predicate. This notion corresponds to the UML concepts of association and attribute. In ontology
languages properties are first-class modeling elements, but UML associations and attributes are not first-class. Our proposal
is backward-compatible with existing UML models while enhancing its viability for ontology modeling. While we have focused
on RDF and DAML+OIL in our research and development activities, the same issues apply to many of the knowledge representation
languages. This is especially the case for semantic network and concept graph approaches to knowledge representations.
Initial sbmission: 16 February 2002 / Revised submission: 15 October 2002 Published online: 2 December 2002 |
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Keywords: | : Ontology – Semantic web – Agents – OO modeling – UML – RDF – DAML |
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