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Ontology Definition Metamodel
Manage Resource Description Framework and Web Ontology Language Models
The ODM UML Profile is the implementation of the Object Management Group's Ontology Definition Metamodel for Enterprise Architect. It provides ontology modeling capabilities within Enterprise Architect (9.2 or later), enabling you to develop large-scale ontologies within the fully-integrated modeling environment, for your project domain.
Through the ODM profile you have access to these features:
- A UML Profile for the Resource Description Framework (RDF)
- A UML Profile for Web Ontology Language (OWL)
- Customized diagram types and toolbox pages, for convenient access to elements and relationships to model ontologies and resources effectively
- Model Templates to get started quickly with ontology modeling
- Commands to import and export RDF and OWL files, and to define new namespaces for ODM Packages and new labels for OWL and RDF elements
Ontologies
Ontologies define a common vocabulary for sharing information in a domain. They provide a standardized, machine-interpretable definition of basic concepts within the domain, and of relations among them. Formally defined ontologies give stakeholders the ability to:
- Share common understanding of the structure of information among themselves or among software agents
- Reuse domain knowledge
- Explicitly codify domain assumptions
- Separate domain knowledge from operational knowledge
- Analyze domain knowledge effectively
The OMG ODM
The Ontology Definition Metamodel has been formalized by the OMG as a standard.
It defines an important set of enabling capabilities for Model Driven Architecture (MDA) for a formalized representation of business semantics and taxonomies, and knowledge representation based on those formalizations. It defines extensions to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to provide a custom modeling notation for ontology definition. These extensions are:
- The Resource Description Framework (RDF), used to represent data, properties and formal semantics of information in the web
- Web Ontology Language (OWL), used to represent terms in vocabularies, and their interrelationships; OWL extends the RDF to define both the domain information and the relevant domain meaning