RE: UML/XMI and semantic web

Oliver,

Although I am coming at this with a distinct life sciences bias, a group
of us (the Bio-Ontologies Consortium) did evaluate (by feature) a
variety of languages for describing ontologies for the life sciences.
The results are published in
http://www.ai.sri.com/~pkarp/pubs/00-ismb.pdf. In summary, the group
found that UML was not as expressive as some of the other alternatives
(XOL, OML). Nor was it universally supported by most biological
applications. It also seemed to impose a particular point of view that
hindered its use by humans (simplicity). Possibly, and object-oriented
view is not necessarily the best way to think about the complex, related
information found in the life sciences. This is an ongoing topic of
discussion at both http://www.i3c.org and http://www.omg.org/lsr. 

Since then, the Bio-ontologies Consortium has voted to use DAML+OIL as
the ontological language of choice for describing such life science
items as genomes, proteomes, biochemical pathways, etc. The group is
very interested to see where things are headed wrt RDF/S and DAML.

Eric 




> -----Original Message-----
> From: oliver fodor [mailto:fodor@itc.it]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2001 6:08 AM
> To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> Subject: UML/XMI and semantic web
> 
> 
> Hi!
> 
> I'm evaluating XML-based technologies for a tool providing 
> interoperability 
> on the data level between different systems in the tourism domain. 
> Naturally the question of building ontologies has came up. 
> Observing the 
> research in this area it is still unclear to me whether it is 
> possible/feasible to use UML as modelling language for 
> onthologies and then 
> XMI in order to provide a machine readable form? Please give 
> me some pros - 
> contras, considering UML/XMI and let's say OIL based 
> modelling. I'd also 
> welcome some related URLs.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> oliver
> 



________________________________________

Eric K. Neumann PhD
VP Bioinformatics

Beyond Genomics
40 Bear Hill Road
Waltham, MA

tel: 781-434-0222
fax: 781-890-1119

www.beyondgenomics.com
________________________________________

Received on Tuesday, 13 November 2001 16:29:18 UTC