OMG Issues RFP for Linking Architectures & Models with RDF Linked Open Data

At the technical committee meeting last week in Long Beach California,
the Object Management Group issued a request for proposals to provide
better connectivity between models and modeling languages defined in OMG
and RDF Linked Open Data. 

 

The OMG (www.omg.org <http://www.omg.org/> ) is the premier standards
organization for modeling, middleware and architecture.  OMG standards
include UML, BPMN, UPDM (UML Profile for DoDAF), SoaML, SysML, Ontology
Definition Metamodel, Model Driven Architecture (MDA), Records
Management, Corba and may others.  All of these modeling standards are
based on the "Meta Object Facility" (MOF) which uses the XMI interchange
format for model interoperability.

 

The RFP issued last week will result in a standard for representing all
MOF based models and modeling languages using RDF and Linked Open Data.
This has multiple advantages:  All OMG-MOF based models (UML, BPMN, SOA,
UPDM, Etc) will be able to be published as Linked Open Data and thus
take advantage of the LOD tools and community.  This will allow
architectural information to be linked, queried with and analyzed with
other kinds of information on the web and will also allow architectures
to be linked and queried with architectures in incompatible models.
Architectures as data will become first-class citizens in the global
data cloud.

 

The RFP asks for a "Structural mapping" which means that the model
vocabulary remains unchanged.  For example, a UML model retains the UML
vocabulary.  The structural mapping can then convert any kind of model
without information loss, but it does not translate between vocabularies
as is done in the UML class diagram to OWL mapping defined in the
Ontology Definition Metamodel.  Other semantic mappings and ontologies
are expected in the future.

 

More information on the details can be found in the RFP document here:
http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?ad/2009-12-09

 

The objective of the RFP is summarized as follows:

Title: MOF to RDF Structural Mapping  in support of Linked Open Data

RDF and Linked Open Data (LOD) have become important technologies for
exposing, managing, analyzing, linking and federating data and metadata.
This set of RDF based technologies, sometimes known as the "Semantic
Web" or "Web 3.0", are emerging as the lingua franca of data on the web.
Major initiatives such as the President's open government initiative are
moving to the use of RDF & Linked Open Data as the foundation for
publishing all government data and metadata in support of transparency.
OMG & MOF based models should be a part of the LOD and Web 3.0 data
cloud.

The objective of this RFP is to define a structural mapping between
OMG-MOF models and RDF to provide for better integration of MDA and LOD,
to enable the ability to apply LOD capabilities to MOF compliant models
and to make the information available in MOF compliant models available
as LOD web resources.  Any MOF based model should be able to become a
LOD resource.

 

The model/LOD connection is also very good news for the Open Government
Initiative which calls for government to be more open, visible,
collaborative and participatory.  Government architectures are the
primary source of structured information about government processes,
services, rules and data.  As such the data contained in these models,
which will become visible as Linked Open Data, will further the open
government initiative.

 

ModelDriven.org has done a preliminary open source implementation of
this mapping as part of the Enterprise Knowledge Base (EKB) project
(http://portal.modeldriven.org/project/EKB).  Those interested in
participating in the standards and/or open source efforts are welcome to
contact us for more information on how to engage.  Cory Casanave, who
championed the RFP, may be contacted at: (cory-c at modeldriven dot
com).

 

Please forward this notice to other interested parties in the ontology
and modeling communities.