A New Method for Mapping UML Class into OWL Ontology (2012)

In this paper we describe how UML schemes can be converted into OWL Ontology, thus enabling reasoning on them by Semantic Web applications. The proposed solution is based on a three phases approach, the first step is to present the class diagram in the mathematical formulation and the second one is converting the UML Class into encoded text file, finally, the structure of the classification scheme is converted into OWL ontology. We demonstrate the practical applicability of our approach by showing how the results of reasoning on these OWL ontology can help improve the Web systems. Keywordscomponent; RDF, OWL, Web ontologie,UML 1.INTRODUCTION This document aims to define a correspondence between the class diagrams of Unified Modeling Language (UML) [1] and OWL using the mathematical representation of the class diagram. The OWL Web Ontology Language [2] is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. The use of ontology Web is growing rapidly since the emergence of the Semantic Web. Most of the data is still modeled and stored in relational databases / objects and therefore out of reach for many applications of the Semantic Web. A critical requirement for the evolution of the current Web of documents into a Web of Data is the inclusion of the vast quantities of data stored in Relational Databases (RDB). The mapping of these vast quantities of data from RDB to the Resource Description Framework (RDF) has been the focus of a large body of research work in diverse domains. Some of the most notable approaches of this kind are R2O [3], D2RQ [4], Virtuoso RDF Views [5, 6] and DartGrid [7]. The R2O approach defines declarative and extensible language (in xml) to describe mapping between given RDB and an OWL ontology or RDFS schema so that tools can process this mapping and generate triples that correspond to source RDB data. G.Bumans et al [8] demonstrate a very simple standard SQLbased RDB to RDF/OWL mapping approach that is based on defining correspondence between the tables of the database and the classes of the ontology, as well as between table fields/links in the database and datatype/object properties in the ontology. UML models cannot be easily exchanged over the Web, the reasoning possibilities with UML models being also quite restricted. [9] and [10] propose a simples transformations between UML and ontology representation languages. Recently, some efforts arose in bringing together UML and the Semantic Web. Nevertheless, most of these approaches do not use all proprieties of the UML diagrams as a data source. In this direction several researches are underway to transform data into Web semantic (XML/RDF/OWL). J. Fong et al [11] proposes a method for Converting relational database into XML data with DOM. Wu and Hsieh [12] used a technique for mapping UML to XML. They created XSD from class diagrams, but this technique is very complex to generate the XSD file for each class diagram. In our previous work [13], we have developed a Framework for converting a class diagram into an XML document and show how to use Web files for the design of data based on the classification UML. Our approach for mapping is based on several steps. First step is to formulate the class diagram into a mathematical structure and transform it into an encoded text file (Section II). After the text file is imported into the system to build the structure of OWL diagram using the algorithm called GenarateOWL described in Section III, and finally the exported OWL file will be validated and stored 2.UML FOR THE SEMANTIC WEB A. Mathematical representation of UML Class. Modeling Layer allows the representation of the UML model into a logical representation. For this task, we have applied a mathematical approach for semantically enriching of the UML Model. In our approach, a class diagram in UML is represented as a set of classes, denoted as 4-tuple:   R O A N C C C C C C C UML , , , ( : :   