Leveraging UML in RDF

Folks,

the UML community developed a set of useful models for representing
static and dynamic components of software-intensive systems. UML is an
industry standard and serves as a modeling basis for emerging standards
in other areas like OIM, CWM etc. As of today there exist a variety of
UML vocabularies for describing object models, datatypes, database
schemas, transformations etc.

Wouldn't it be nice to make these models universally accessible,
evolvable and mixable on the Web? This is not a purely altruistic
statement. In fact, I needed a comprehensive finite-state machine model,
and UML has got a really nice one that I want to reuse.

I'm working on making UML "RDF-compatible". The first step is to
represent the UML conceptual model in RDF. This is similar to defining
an alternative RDF Schema specification. UML bootstraps itself in a way
similar to RDFS. It is however significantly more verbose and contains a
lot of details that go far beyond RDFS.

I gave it a try. RDF-encoding of the UML Foundation/Core package
(without "auxiliary elements") can be found at

	http://www-db.stanford.edu/~melnik/rdf/uml/uml-core.rdf

I don't have a Web page describing the rationale, and pros and cons of
the design yet. Have a look. If you are familiar with RDFS, you'll
probably understand the specs without knowing much about UML. [1] and
[2] can be of help. I'm using only the basic RDF constructs such as
rdf:type and rdf:Seq. The encoding is incomplete and may contain
"semantic" mistakes.

Higher-level UML models (like statecharts) can be encoded using the
UML/RDF vocabulary defined on the above page. Let me know what you think
of the idea.

Sergey

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-rdf-uml/
[2] ftp://ftp.omg.org/pub/docs/ad/99-06-08.pdf

Received on Friday, 21 April 2000 06:25:36 UTC