Networked Knowledge Representation and Exchange using UML and RDF

Abstract

This paper proposes the use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a language for modelling ontologies for Web resources and the knowledge contained within them. To provide a mechanism for serialising and processing object diagrams representing knowledge, a pair of XSLT stylesheets have been developed to map from XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) encodings of class diagrams to corresponding RDF schemas and to Java classes representing the concepts in the ontologies. The Java code includes methods for marshalling and unmarshalling object-oriented information between in-memory data structures and RDF serialisations of that information. This provides a convenient mechanism for Java applications to share knowledge on the Web.