OWL ODM

Welcome

The OWL ODM project aims at building a MOF-based metamodel and a UML profile for networked ontologies.

Motivation

A metamodel built on the Meta Object Facility (MOF) brings several benefits. Firstly, standardized mappings of the MOF to specific target languages or formats can be used to automatically build concrete representations. For example, a Java API can be derived using the MOF-Java mapping directly from the metamodel. Moreover, we can utilize MDA’s support in modeling tools, model management and interoperability with other MOF-defined metamodels.

Language mappings, also called groundings, define the relationship with the particular formalism and provide the semantics for the metamodel. Furthermore, the extensibility capabilities of MOF allow to add new modules to the metamodel if required in the future.

A UML profile next to this metamodel employs the extensibility features of UML2 to allow a visual notation for the modeling of ontologies for folks familiar with UML. Leveraging UML for this purpose is a first step towards a model driven approach for modeling and implementing ontologies. The validity of instances of the metamodel is ensured through various OCL constraints.

Supported formalisms

Currently, OWL DL, OWL 1.1, SWRL, F-Logic and OWL mapping formalisms C-OWL, DL-Safe Mappings and DL for II are supported.

Contributions by
Saartje Brockmans, Peter Haase, Tian Bai, Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Raphael Volz, Moritz Weiten and Zhuoyao Wang.

OWL ODM is a project of OntoWare.

Ontoware Terms of use