A Formal Approach To Transforming Uml Class Diagrams To Owl Dl Ontologies

Nowadays, there are some serious problems in information expression and information searching in the current Internet. Aiming at resolving these problems, Tim Berners-Lee proposed the concept of the Semantic Web. In the layered structure of the Semantic web, ontologies play an essential role. Currently, the ontology language of the Semantic Web is OWL (Web Ontology Language) recommended by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). OWL contains three sublanguages namely, OWL Lite, OWL DL and OWL Full. Among these three sublanguages, OWL DL is more powerful than OWL Lite, andmeanwhile it provides efficient reasoning support.Full implementation of the Semantic Web requires widespread availability of Web ontologies. However, manual development of ontologies using current ontology editors is still a fairly time-consuming and hard work, which has resulted in a bottleneck for knowledge acquisition in the Semantic Web.UML (Unified Modeling Language) has become a modeling standard accepted widely by practitioners. So applying UML to support the Semantic Web ontology engineering has become a rising topic. The reasoning possibilities with UML models are quite restricted.According to transforming UML class diagrams into OWL DL ontologies, reusing peviously specified knowledge in UML class diagrams is a good method for ontology engineering. This thesis analyses and summarizes the similarities and differences between the elements in UML class diagram and OWL DL. On the basis, a formal approach to converting UML class diagrams into OWL DL ontologies is proposed. The semantics in UML class diagrams are reserved as more as possible in the conversion. For such a purpose, a conversion tool is hereby developed, which shows that the proposed approach is correct and effective.