A Graphical Tool for Automatic Generation of OWL Ontologies

Abstract

The ontologies are became the backbone of the semantic web, the development of these ontologies from scratch is a very difficult task. The use of models is useful to deal with such problems since it allows visually modeling of the ontologies themselves. In this paper, we propose an approach based on the combined use of Meta-modeling and Graph Grammars to automatically generate a visual modeling tool for OWL ontologies. In our approach registered in the MDA architecture, the UML Class diagram formalism is used to define a metamodel of class diagrams. The meta-modeling tool ATOM3 is used to generate a visual modeling tool according to the proposed class diagram meta-model. We have also proposed a graph grammar to automatically generate OWL ontologies of the graphically specified class diagram models. This allows the user to pass a very important step in the development process of OWL ontologies. Our environment is illustrated through an example.