Transformations, external tools - universAAL/tools.eclipse-plugins GitHub Wiki

"The current use of OWL and UML seems to focus on mappings from UML to OWL, do some inference/query, and get back information that is not explicitly captured in the UML models (e.g. detecting some inconsistencies, or inferring some class membership). There are some recent works that look at using semantic Web technologies (ontologies, RDF, not necessary OWL) for traceability, where discovering some "hidden" relationships between various artifacts (e.g. informal requirements and UML models) seems to find some applicability (but I haven't really seen very convincing examples in the literature yet). There is an EU project related to ontologies and UML that might be of interest to you: http://www.most-project.eu/. There are a couple of relevant/recent eclipse tools that you might want to check out:

We are investigating in particular for traceability the use of these tools and potential extensions in the context of a MSc thesis we are supervising in our group. The difficult part so far has been in finding some concrete cases where we could show the need for complex inference/querying that semantic technologies would bring into the picture."

Table of Contents

More existing tools

ATL http://www.eclipse.org/atl/

This tool is one part of the ATL project from Eclipse. ATL is a model transformation language and toolkit that could be used for Model-Driven Engineering. There exists a really long list of already prepared transformations that are supported http://www.eclipse.org/m2m/atl/atlTransformations/ and one of them are transformations between UML and OWL. This is an implementation of the ODM descriptions from OMG http://www.eclipse.org/m2m/atl/usecases/ODMImplementation/. ATL files are text-files that using the ATL language to describe how to transform elements from one language into another one. UML2OWL using EMF and XMI files to represent UML and transform the XML-Elements into OWL and vice versa. Ant-build-scripts will be used to execute the transformation. The steps that are necessary for this are defined in several so called rules given in the appropriate ATL file. Every rule gives information about the transformation from one element in one language to one (or many if necessary) element in the other. Since the appropriate ATL file is free available it will be easy to modify anything if necessary.

UML2OWL http://diplom.ooyoo.de/

This tool is the result out of a Master-Thesis that’s topic was about the transformation between UML and OWL. The main executable result are two XSL-files that are free to download at the homepage of the project. XLS is the short for Extensible Stylesheet Language is an XML based transformation language map XML-documents between different layouts. There are a lot of possibilities to execute XLS-files and there are libraries in many programming languages including Java, C++, C#, PHP and Java script. Most of them are free available. The work of the available XLS-files to transform between UML and OWL primary seems to be based at the work of one man while ATL has a whole community in his background. This is not necessary give us an objective hint what is the better one, but in a first instance it more a point for ATL. On the other hand XLS itself, and in special the sublanguage XSLT, seems to have a more common use. For Example is XSLT embedded in the most famous internet browsers like IE (version 6), Firefox and Opera (version 9). So it will be much easier to use a XLS based solution that is independent from Eclipse.

OWL2XMI http://owl2xmi.sourceforge.net/

OWL2XMI is a java-based project under the GNU/GPI license that only allows transformations from OWL to XMI. It is published by the SWAP (Semantic Web Architecture and Performance Group) that consists of some PhD students from the Polytechnic School in University of the Balearic Islands. At the webpage I couldn’t found the source-code, but since it is under the GPL license it have to be available anywhere. There is not much feedback to the tool available in the web and in fact I cannot get it to work without problems. I had to install manually some part of the Swing- and the Jena-Framework to get it run. Any documentation to the tool is not available (at least I not found anyone).

One more UMLtoOWL http://www.sfu.ca/~dgasevic/projects/UMLtoOWL/

This project is also free available and also based on XSLT, but only offer the transformation from UML to OWL. Like all other projects it can only transform UML class-diagrams and not activity diagrams or something else. Unfortunately this project seems to be last updated in 2006 and therefore is not up to date. But maybe some parts could be a help anyhow.

Helpful links

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