Automated Construction of OWL-S Ontologies from UML: A Model-Driven Approach for Semantic Web Service Modeling

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of Web services has led to growing interest in semantic Web services based on ontologies, which aid in automating discovering, selecting, and combining these services. OWL-S is a prominent framework for semantically describing Web services. However, the complex nature of OWL-S grammar poses challenges in manual ontology construction. This paper introduces an innovative method that uses model driven approach to effortlessly generate OWL-S ontologies from UML models, commonly used in software design and development. By using UML activity diagrams to represent service business process behaviors and derive their precise semantics in OWL-S ontologies, one can encapsulate the main difficult tasks of realizing semantic web services. Moreover, the approach improves independence, accuracy, and expressiveness resulting in a clearer and more understandable ontology design. Through an example, we validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating its superiority over existing approaches.