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SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

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umlTUowl - A Both Generic and Vendor-Specific<br />

Approach for UML to OWL Transformation<br />

Andreas Grünwald<br />

Vienna University of Technology<br />

Karlsplatz 13, 1040 Wien, Austria<br />

Email: a.gruenw@gmail.com<br />

Thomas Moser<br />

Christian Doppler Laboratory CDL-Flex<br />

Vienna University of Technology<br />

Taubstummengasse 11, 1040 Vienna, Austria<br />

Email: thomas.moser@tuwien.ac.at<br />

Abstract—The extraction of knowledge from UML class diagrams<br />

into ontologies is a typically manual thus time-consuming<br />

and error-prone task in software and systems engineering. To<br />

support an automated UML to OWL transformation approach,<br />

purebred and hybrid tool solutions have been researched and<br />

evaluated. Since no approach met the defined requirements, a new<br />

UML to OWL tool, called umlTUowl was designed and realized.<br />

umlTUowl supports the transformation of Visual Paradigm, MS<br />

Visio and ArgoUML UML class diagrams into valid OWL2 DL<br />

and is available as open source software. The tool provides a<br />

novel approach, resolving issues of preceding approaches through<br />

an extensible architecture dealing with the fragility of XML<br />

Metadata Interchange (XMI) by providing traceability and an<br />

automated testing framework for vendor-specific UML tools. In<br />

addition, this work presents an industrial use case, in which<br />

umlTUowl is applied to models from the automation systems<br />

engineering domain. The tool successfully passed all test cases<br />

completely, including the presented industry-specific use case.<br />

Index Terms—Semantic Web; Automated Ontology Creation;<br />

<strong>Knowledge</strong> Modeling; UML to OWL transformation; Industrial<br />

Case Study.<br />

I. INTRODUCTION<br />

Industrial projects, such as performed by the Christian<br />

Doppler Laboratory ”Software Engineering Integration for<br />

Flexible Automation <strong>Systems</strong>” (CDL-Flex) at Vienna University<br />

of Technology (TU Vienna), often require the collaboration<br />

of people with different domain expertise and methodological<br />

approaches that should provide their heterogeneous<br />

knowledge into an overall solution. The CDL-Flex tackles this<br />

kind of issues by leveraging OWL ontologies as explicit data<br />

model specifications, which enable the intercommunication<br />

of heterogeneous tools based on a semantically level within<br />

CDL-Flexs integration framework called Engineering <strong>Knowledge</strong><br />

Base Engineering <strong>Knowledge</strong> Base (EKB) [12].<br />

However, there is still an important issue to cover, concerning<br />

the common lack of experience regarding ontologies,<br />

i.e. OWL, by project members. Engineers do not only often<br />

have insufficient knowledge about ontologies; furthermore,<br />

the maintenance of sophisticated OWL ontologies by itself is<br />

challenging, error-prone and may lead to unrecognized consequences<br />

during runtime. Common modeling components (e.g.<br />

used for software technology, automation systems engineering<br />

and industrial automation) are scattered across team roles thus<br />

it may be unreasonable, not to say impossible, to expect that<br />

team members make a shift from their prefered modeling<br />

language towards OWL.<br />

CDL-Flexs project experience shows that most of the engineers<br />

are familiar with simple concepts using UML class<br />

diagram notation. Hence, UML modeling tools, such as Visual<br />

Paradigm (VP)’s UML editor 1 can be established to collect and<br />

share domain knowledge between project partners, primarily<br />

using UML’s logical data model notation. An UML to OWL<br />

tool may be leveraged to replace ontology experts who have<br />

to transfer this UML diagrams into adequate OWL knowledge<br />

bases.<br />

In this work, existing UML to OWL transformation solutions<br />

will be evaluated with respect to their practical applicability.<br />

After discussing pros and cons of even more<br />

persuasive solutions, i.e. Eclipse’s (ATLAS Transformation<br />

Language (ATL) and TwoUse Toolkit, as well as common<br />

issues regarding XMI transformations, the lack and necessity<br />

of a flexible, easy-adaptable model to model solution becomes<br />

obvious. Thus this work introduces the developed transformation<br />

tool umlTUowl. The application of the tool, which is<br />

capable of transforming VP XMI 2.1, MS Visio XMI 1.0 or<br />

ArgoUML XMI 2.1 class diagrams into OWL ontologies, is<br />

then illustrated by presenting an industry-specific use case.<br />

The innovation of umlTUowl lies in the combination of<br />

the benefits of classical meta models with a vendor-specific<br />

but flexible implementation approach. While conventional<br />

transformation tools either fail by trying to provide a solution<br />

that is capable to deal with all XMI standards or simply<br />

assume that a model-specific implementation implies that the<br />

tool is compatible with all other XMI versions of all different<br />

vendors, umlTUowl considers this grievances by providing a<br />

traceable, testable, integrable, extensible framework approach<br />

that might also be of scientific value.<br />

II. EVALUATION OF EXISTING TRANSFORMATION TOOLS<br />

Because large vendors tend to come up with new ontology<br />

modeling solutions currently, existing tools have been<br />

grouped into purebred UML to OWL transformation and<br />

hybrid modeling tools during evaluation phase. Latter are<br />

often sophisticated graphical tools, which do not support<br />

1 http://www.visual-paradigm.com<br />

730

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