Transforming Between UML Conceptual Models And OWL 2 Ontologies

The ISO 19103 standard—defining rules and guidelines for conceptual modeling in the geographic domain—has deliberately chosen the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as “conceptual schema language” for geographic information systems. From today’s perspective—i.e. when taking into account today’s mature semantic web technology—another language might also be envisioned as language for specifying applicationoriented conceptual models, namely the Web Ontology Language OWL 2. Both language definitions refer to comparable meta-models laid down in terms of OMG’s Meta Object Facility, but in contrast to UML, OWL 2 is fully built upon formal logic which allows logical reasoning on OWL 2 ontologies. In this paper, we investigate language similarities and differences by specifying and implementing the transformation on the meta-model level using the QVT transformation language.