A Model-Driven Approach for Converting UML Model to OWL-S Ontology

Based on ontologies, semantic Web services enable the discovery, selection, and composition. OWL-S is a do facto standard ontology for describing semantics of Web services. Due to the difficulty of the OWL-S grammar, the teaming curve for constructing OWL-S description manually can be steep. This paper presents an efficient method for generating OWL-S descriptions from UML diagrams, which are widely used for software design and development. The proposed method is based on UML profiles to generate an OWL-S ontology from sequence or activity diagrams, which represent the behavior of a business process. Specifically, an XMI file extracted from UML diagrams is transformed into an OWL-S description via an XSLT script. Experimental results with a large volume of UML diagrams show that the proposed method deals with the control flow of complex processes and is superior to previous methods.