uml2semantics is an application that allows you to convert a UML class diagram to an OWL 2 ontology. Translating a UML
class diagram to an OWL 2 ontology allows one to reason over the ontology and thereby discover possible
inconsistencies or unintended consequences. The UML to OWL translation we use is based on
UML to OWL, which
provides the related Manchester syntax and SROIQ semantics.
Project status
uml2semantics is in the very early stages of development and thus is missing many features. Currently it has support
for specifying classes and attributes/associations using TSV files.
Assumption
This tool assumes that the UML class diagrams are conceptual models and as such they contain no implementation related details like interfaces, access modifiers or operations.
Downloading
Download uml2semantics.jar from latest release.
Quick Start
Employer and Employee example
As a quick start here is a small UML class diagram that we will convert to OWL. We define a Person class
that has attributes name, surname and dateOfBirth. The types we use are name and surname is xsd:string
and for dateOfBirth we use xsd:dateTime. Employee and Employer extends Person. An employee has exactly 1
employer and an employer has 1 or more employees.
TSV representation
UML class diagram information can be specified using TSV files. First create the TSV file for your classes. It has the following format:
| Curie | Name | Definition | ParentNames |
|---|---|---|---|
| Person | |||
| Employee | Person | ||
| Employer | Person |
Here we only specify the name for each class, hence the reason we used the Name column to define our classes. Since
Employee and Employer both extend the Person class, we add Person to ParentNames column. Multiple parents are
separated by |. Curie refer to compact URI based on the W3C CURIE syntax.
If you want to make use of enumerations, specify them next. The format is as follows:
| Curie | Name | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| emp:SalarySchedule | PaymentSchedule | Defines the frequency of payments |
Again you can specify a curie and/or a name to refer to your enumeration. In this case we assume there is a difference between the purl and the label of this concept. Definition allows you to describe this enumeration.
The values that an enumeration exists of, are specified in a different TSV with the following format:
| Enumeration | Curie | Name | Definition |
|---|---|---|---|
| emp:SalarySchedule | emp:Daily | Employee gets paid at the end of each day | |
| PaymentSchedule | Weekly | Employee gets paid at the end of each week on a Friday | |
| emp:SalarySchedule | emp:Monthly | Employee gets paid at the last day of the month |
Enumeration refers the name or curie of an enumeration. Each value of an enumeration can have a curie and/or a name and a definition.
To specify attributes we use the following format.
| Class | Curie | Name | ClassEnumOrPrimitiveType | MinMultiplicity | MaxMultiplicity | Definition |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Person | name | xsd:string | ||||
| Person | surname | xsd:string | ||||
| Person | dateOfBirth | xsd:dateTime | ||||
| Employee | employedBy | Employer | 1 | 1 | ||
| Employer | employes | Employee | 1 | * |
Class refers to the class for which we are defining the attributes. Attributes can also be defined using curies,
but we again only used names for now. The type of an attribute can be a primitive or a class. Currenlty XML primitive data
types used in Protege Desktop as data types are supported. When no multiplicity is given,
[1..1] is assumed. * is to refer to infinite as per usual.
A Google spreadsheet for this UML class diagram can be found here. Save the classes and attributes tabs as TSV files.
Run uml2semantics
Assuming you have download uml2semantics to a$uml2semantics directory and saved the .tsv files to this directory as well,
you can run it as follows:
java -jar uml2semantics.jar \
-c "$uml2semantics/Employer - Classes.tsv" \
-a "$uml2semantics/Employer - Attributes.tsv" \
-e "$uml2semantics/Employer - Enumerations.tsv" \
-n "$uml2semantics/Employer - EnumerationNamedValues.tsv" \
-o "$uml2semantics/employer.rdf" \
-p "emp:http://uml2semantics.org/examples/employer#" \
-i "http://uml2semantics.org/examples/employer/v.0.1"
This will cause the ontology to be written out to $uml2semantics/employer.owl. An example of this file can be seen
here
DCAT version 2 Example
Initial DCAT version 2 example is defined here.