- From: Holger Knublauch <holger@smi.stanford.edu>
- Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 15:34:10 +1000
- To: "'SWBPD'" <public-swbp-wg@w3.org>
Thanks for the invitation to review chapter 16 of the ODM draft. Sorry for the long delay with my response. I don't have any technical objections to this draft. The mapping would allow to represent many OWL DL models using UML notation, and the chosen mapping is straight forward. This approach fills the gap of visual modeling standards for OWL and should hopefully be compatible to existing tools. The only item that needs to be clarified is the purpose of the mapping. In its current form, rdf:Properties are mapped into OWL classes, so that they can be used in multiple places in the diagram. This reflects the syntax of RDF, where properties are stand-alone entities, independent from specific classes. The obvious mismatch is that in UML, attributes and associations are typically assigned to a single class. I am sure the working group has thought a lot about this fundamental mismatch, and the current proposal is probably the most feasible way of achieving at least syntactic interoperability. However, the question remains where do we go from here. The resulting "UML" diagrams will be of little use for people who are approaching them with an object oriented background, because properties are not modeled as they would be in UML. So while the mapping is syntactically correct, a much more important contribution would have been to provide a semantic mapping between UML diagrams from the real world, and OWL models from the Semantic Web, so that developers can map between existing (legacy) UML diagrams or source code, and OWL/RDF models. I did not follow the state of the work in the ODM group closely enough but I would be interested to hear about the plans for such a second kind of bidirectional mapping between UML and OWL, because this is what we as tool developers are particularly interested in. On this occasion I would also like to hear of any real implementations of UML-OWL mappings so that we could include them into Protege-OWL. Holger
Received on Friday, 28 January 2005 05:34:54 UTC