Authors:
Anitta Thomas
1
;
Aurona J. Gerber
2
and
Alta van der Merwe
3
Affiliations:
1
University of South Africa, South Africa
;
2
University of Pretoria and CSIR Meraka, South Africa
;
3
University of Pretoria, South Africa
Keyword(s):
Visual Syntax Specification, UML Class Diagrams, UML Package Diagrams, OWL, Ontology, Ontology Reasoner, Protégé.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications and Case-studies
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Diagrams are often studied as visual languages with an abstract and a concrete syntax (concrete syntax is
often referred to as visual syntax), where the latter contains the visual representations of the concepts in the
former. A formal specification of the concrete syntax is useful in diagram processing applications as well as
in achieving unambiguous understanding of diagrams. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a commonly
used modeling language to represent software models using its diagrams. Class and package diagrams are two
diagrams of UML. The motivation for this work is twofold; UML lacks a formal visual syntax specification
and ontologies are under-explored for visual syntax specifications. The work in this paper, therefore, explores
using ontologies for visual syntax specifications by specifying the visual syntax of a set of UML class and
package diagram constructs as an ontology in the Web ontology language, OWL. The reasoning features of
the ontology reasoners are then used
to verify the visual syntax specification. Besides formally encoding the
visual syntax of numerous UML constructs, the work also demonstrates the general value of using OWL for
visual syntax specifications.
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