OWL/RDF to UML Converter

3
votes

I'm new to the concept of OWL/RDF ontologies and thinking it would useful to be able to convert them to UML so I could then generate class skeletons using my IDE. Assuming this is a reasonable thing to do, can you please recommend an approach?

I'm aware that there are OWL/RDF parsers like this one, but I can't find any that will convert to UML.

EDIT:

Based on the comments let me modify the question:

When starting a new project based on an existing ontology is there a way to easily create skeleton classes as a starting point? I do not need to synchronize changes between the ontology and the classes - it is a one time setup that I expect will take a significant amount of copy and paste which strikes me as the wrong approach.

If I'm not using ontologies correctly, can you please explain what their purpose is (if any) in designing class hierarchies?

Here's an example of what I want to implement (except this is only 1 sensor and I need to implement several):

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/XGR-ssn-20110628/#Smart_product_example

2
umlrdfowl
RDF is usually used as dynamic bunch of triples and also the Wikidata uses very dynamic structure. It's used to describe physical things that don't change so often, but the software models (UML classes) used by computers can change quite frequently. If your software would interface the current dynamic implementations you'd have to convert and regenerate the code also very often (at runtime?). What do you expect from the conversion (other then a code generator saving developer's time)? Can you provide some use cases or user stories? – xmojmr
OWL can represent a bunch of things that won't be very easy, if possible at all, to represent in UML. There are lots of tools that visualize an OWL ontology, though. Protege is a very popular one. That said, the question is probably off-topic for Stack Overflow, since (quoting the close reason), "questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam." – Joshua Taylor
"When starting a new project based on an existing ontology is there a way to easily create skeleton classes as a starting point? " That's really kind of a different question than the visualization one. 1. There are some tools that do this, but they're typically only going to be able to adhere to part of the ontology. They do exist, though. 2. For the visualization, i think that the diagram in the document that you linked to looks like it was created with CMapTools. – Joshua Taylor
If you were to generally explain what tools exist, how they work, and most importantly why/when to use them that would answer my question (I don't care about the visualization piece). – Charlie

2 Answers

0
votes

Check for UML to OWL converter. It converts UML to RDF/OWL, so it does job in opposite direction, but it can be used as a template for your task. The converter is based on MDA approach, so requires knowledge of it (MOF, ODM, Eclipse EMF, ATL), which is worth to have.

-4
votes

My understanding is that the concept of the "semantic web" is still largely in the visionary stage and will not impact developers for some time. The initial applications seem to be centered around knowledge sharing between humans not machines. Hopefully it moves toward machine-to-machine sharing as there doesn't appear to be any interest in that at this time.