Re: Leveraging UML in RDF

This is pretty interesting. As you point out, Walter Chang attempted
something similar, comparing RDF Schema constructs of the time  
with similar mechanisms from UML. One thing not immediately apparent
from Walter's note is that RDF Schema has been significantly slimmed
down since then: many of the constraint forms he discussed are not
provided by the RDFS core.

See the older RDFS spec at http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-rdf-schema-19980409/
to see what we removed. Basically it was:

	3.2.1 Necessary and may occur only once : RDFS:ExactlyOne 
	3.2.2 Necessary and may occur any number of times : RDFS:OneOrMore 
	3.2.3 Optional and may occur at most once : RDFS:ZeroOrOne 
	3.2.4 Optional and may occur any number of times : RDFS:ZeroOrMore 
	
In the working group's judgement, these could be added in later using
the extensibility mechanism. I'm now wondering whether a UML-over-RDF
document might in fact be a mechanism for providing a constraint
utilities vocabulary... 

Dan


On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, Sergey Melnik wrote:

> 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 06:58:11 UTC