Note

Date: Aug. 7, 1998
Link: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-rdf-uml/
Source Author or Organization: W3C

Excerpted from "Introduction": "This note summarizes the relationship between RDF-Schema and UML, the generic industry standard object-oriented modeling framework for information systems modeling. This note will briefly describe these systems then relate them to each other."

"Web-based and non-Web based applications can be described by a number of schema specification mechanisms, including RDF-Schema. The RDF-Schema model itself is equivalent to a subset of the class model in UML. RDF-Schema uses a DLG (Directed Labeled Graph) model for describing schemas."

"Class schemas expressed in UML can be viewed also as DLGs. If a DLG is used for a class model schema in UML, the RDF-Schema DLG can be shown to be isomorphic to a subgraph of the UML class schema DLG. This is possible because RDF-Schema elements map directly into UML class model elements."

" In addition, the DAG formed by considering RDF-Schema subClassOf class inheritance structures maps directly to UML class generalization DAGs, RDF class properties map to UML class attributes, and RDF properties and property cardinality constraints map to UML associations and association constraints."

"The various constructs and elements in the class models of UML and RDF-Schema readily map between each other. While currently the RDF-Schema work does not have counterparts to the other 5 remaining UML modeling areas, RDF-Schema could be extended to support these models as well."

"Given that an application schema can be described by RDF-Schema (or UML), how do RDF-Schema and UML actually relate to each other?"

"The remainder of this note describes the relationship between the elements of the class models for RDF-Schema and UML. An outline is presented below to show how a given schema represented by the RDF-Schema model can be transformed into an equivalent UML class schema representation."

Further, given any UML class schema representation, we can specify an equivalent RDF-Schema representation.