Using UML for Ontology Construction: a Case Study in Agriculture
Résumé
Ontologies provide a solid support for new technologies such as software agents, e-commerce and knowledge managements. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been largely accepted by the software industry as the standard language for modeling software. The heart of ontologies are concepts and relationships between them and UML is the most used tool to model the relationships between concepts in an application domain. Therefore, there are compelling reasons to use UML to model ontologies. Our presentation focuses on the intersection of these two technologies and their application in developing agricultural systems. First, a comparison of ontology concepts and UML artifacts allows for creating a common denominator between the two technologies and after, examples from the domain of agriculture show how to create ontologies using UML. Ontologies include hierarchies of classes and/or subclasses, relationships between classes, class attributes definitions and axioms that specify constraints. In UML the relationships between concepts are presented in class diagrams and constraints are expressed using the Object Constraint Language (OCL).