UML-OWL Generator, A product to convert UML into OWL

Well, I hate to be the first pile on, buuuuuuut...

...what do you think you are patenting? It's hard to see anything  
patentable here. What is patentable doesn't seem worth patenting and  
certainly not worth the antipathy that 1) patenting and 2) pimping  
your prima facie silly patenting generates.

(Given the many mapping of UML to OWL in the literature, I would be  
interested to know what you thought was novel.)

I couldn't fine your patent in google's patent search, but I did find:
    http://www.google.com/patents?id=NR6XAAAAEBAJ
though Elisa is a member of the OWL WG thus, presumably, is going to  
be somewhat RANDy about this. I guess that one is going "the other  
way", i.e., OWL to UML.

Finally, having your "try it" be "email us stuff and we'll email you  
stuff back in 24 hrs":
        http://www.umlowlgen.com/index.php?p=1_4_Try-It-
is...well,  silly. Why not set up an actual, if limited, web service?

Similarly, your "test case" consists of a screen shot and a set of  
stats...why not have the actual models/ontologies available for  
download?

Finally, I don't see any pricing, download, or sales contact.

Not auspicious.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Bijan,
 
We'll take your sarcastic feedback in positive way, even it wasn't.

The generator is "Patent Pending", so you will not find in Google for a year
period.

This work is different from Elisa's work, where her work is more about ODM,
UML-OWL Generator has nothing to do with ODM.

The generator works only from UML to OWL, and the unique thing about it is
how it deals with complex UML models & metamodels of multiple packages, not
toy examples as most literatures ended up with.

We would be happy if you point us at any product of one of "many
literatures" that works in real production environment.

We appreciate your feedback on the website, we will add a web service for
"Try It" to support interactive test, and will make models and ontologies
available on "Test Case".

Thanks,

UML-OWL Team
info@...

-----Original Message-----
From: public-owl-dev-request@... [mailto:public-owl-dev-request@...]
On Behalf Of Bijan Parsia
Sent: Sunday, May 03, 2009 5:47 AM
To: UML-OWL Gen
Cc: public-owl-dev@...; Elisa F. Kendall
Subject: Re: UML-OWL Generator, A product to convert UML into OWL

Well, I hate to be the first pile on, buuuuuuut...

...what do you think you are patenting? It's hard to see anything  
patentable here. What is patentable doesn't seem worth patenting and  
certainly not worth the antipathy that 1) patenting and 2) pimping  
your prima facie silly patenting generates.

(Given the many mapping of UML to OWL in the literature, I would be  
interested to know what you thought was novel.)

I couldn't fine your patent in google's patent search, but I did find:
    http://www.google.com/patents?id=NR6XAAAAEBAJ
though Elisa is a member of the OWL WG thus, presumably, is going to  
be somewhat RANDy about this. I guess that one is going "the other  
way", i.e., OWL to UML.

Finally, having your "try it" be "email us stuff and we'll email you  
stuff back in 24 hrs":
        http://www.umlowlgen.com/index.php?p=1_4_Try-It-
is...well,  silly. Why not set up an actual, if limited, web service?

Similarly, your "test case" consists of a screen shot and a set of  
stats...why not have the actual models/ontologies available for  
download?

Finally, I don't see any pricing, download, or sales contact.

Not auspicious.

Cheers,
Bijan.

On 3 May 2009, at 17:01, UML-OWL Gen wrote:

> Bijan,
>
> We'll take your sarcastic feedback in positive way, even it wasn't.

That's big of you! I'm really really really impressed!

(Btw, *that* was sarcasm. There was no sarcasm in my original post.  
Accusing someone of sarcasm is a good way to end up with a big heaping  
dose of it :))

> The generator is "Patent Pending", so you will not find in Google  
> for a year
> period.

Ah. That makes your link to usa.gov confusing.

A white paper or some other technical description would be helpful.

> This work is different from Elisa's work, where her work is more  
> about ODM,
> UML-OWL Generator has nothing to do with ODM.

I don't know if having something to do with ODM matters.

> The generator works only from UML to OWL, and the unique thing about  
> it is
> how it deals with complex UML models & metamodels of multiple  
> packages,

How exciting! You must be very excited! It's so exciting!

> not
> toy examples as most literatures ended up with.

Again, it's hard to evaluate anything when the concrete technical  
details are so lacking. It's hard to evaluate the spread of your  
patent as well when there are no details.

But I'm confused by what the problem *would* be. Either there is a  
mapping from UML into OWL or there isn't. (There are many of course,  
but I generally think of the ones that purport to capture the  
semantics of UML diagrams). Once you have the mapping, implementing  
such a transform is, as long as it's purely syntactic, trivial. (In  
the sense of a mere matter of parsing.)

So the only part that seems, afaict from the extremely limited  
information supplied, to be *possibly* novel is the mapping itself.  
And yeah, I'm skeptical that that is interestingly novel.

> We would be happy if you point us at any product of one of "many
> literatures" that works in real production environment.

This seems to confuse implementation with invention. It also confuses  
the burden of proof. If *you're* seeking a patent, as  
you ...er...*are*, then presumably *you've* done the relevant  
literature search and analysis. Thus, you should be in a position to  
1) tell me what the alternatives are and 2) tell me the differences  
between them and your approach. If you have, in fact, missed something  
that I know about, I'll say so. Similarly, if you've misunderstood  
something, and I detect it, then I'll say so as well.

It doesn't look good when you don't provide technical details. Maybe  
you have to not, but that doesn't make it good looking :)

> We appreciate your feedback on the website,

Always glad to help.

> we will add a web service for
> "Try It" to support interactive test, and will make models and  
> ontologies
> available on "Test Case".

Those will make it easier to figure out what you're doing. A brief  
white paper would also be helpful. I encourage you to submit a  
description to e.g., OWLED.

Also, I'd be happy to know your name :)

I'd *love* to have a good story for OWL and UML, but thus far, you're  
not selling it to me :)

Cheers,
Bijan.

--
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.

In addition to our ODM work, which does include a mapping chapter
describing a number of issues and approaches for mapping from UML to OWL
(in addition to the language metamodel and profiles which would
facilitate this process), there is prior art from AT&T Federal systems
in the form of a set of tools they developed more than 5 years ago with
Lockheed Martin that supported a direct mapping from UML to OWL and
back.  The tools were documented in a number of papers, released in late
2004 as an open source project, which is still available at
http://projects.semwebcentral.org/projects/codip/.  The Duet project was
early work, but was effective at taking vanilla UML models, without
benefit of the ODM metamodel or profile mappings, and producing OWL.

Best regards,

Elisa


UML-OWL Gen wrote:

And going one more step back in the history of ODM, we had a paper  
published on the issues of the UML-OWL mapping in 2002:

K. Baclawski, M. M. Kokar, P. A. Kogut, L. Hart, J. Smith, J.  
Letkowski, and P. Emery. Extending the unified modeling language for  
ontology development. Software and Systems Modeling, 1, 2:142-156, 2002.

@article{Baclawski+02,
   author = {Baclawski, K. and Kokar, M. M. and Kogut, P. A. and Hart,  
L.
                   and Smith, J. and Letkowski, J. and Emery, P.},
   title = {Extending the Unified Modeling Language
                  for Ontology Development},
   journal = {Software and Systems Modeling},
   volume = {1, 2},
   pages = {142--156},
   year = 2002
}


===Mitch Kokar



On May 4, 2009, at 12:32 AM, Elisa Kendall wrote:

In addition to our ODM work, which does include a mapping chapter  
describing a number of issues and approaches for mapping from UML to  
OWL (in addition to the language metamodel and profiles which would  
facilitate this process), there is prior art from AT&T Federal systems  
in the form of a set of tools they developed more than 5 years ago  
with Lockheed Martin that supported a direct mapping from UML to OWL  
and back.  The tools were documented in a number of papers, released  
in late 2004 as an open source project, which is still available at http://projects.semwebcentral.org/projects/codip/ 
..  The Duet project was early work, but was effective at taking  
vanilla UML models, without benefit of the ODM metamodel or profile  
mappings, and producing OWL.

Best regards,

Elisa


UML-OWL Gen wrote:

On 4/5/09 13:23, Mitch Kokar wrote:
> And going one more step back in the history of ODM, we had a paper
> published on the issues of the UML-OWL mapping in 2002:
>
> K. Baclawski, M. M. Kokar, P. A. Kogut, L. Hart, J. Smith, J. Letkowski,
> and P. Emery. Extending the unified modeling language for ontology
> development. Software and Systems Modeling, 1, 2:142-156, 2002.

Ta. Also worth noting that this conversation has been active since since
the early days of RDF/RDFS: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-rdf-uml/ (which
describes earlier versions of RDFS than the minimalist thing we finally
made into a W3C REC).

cheers,

Dan

If we're gathering links:

http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=description+logic+uml&btnG=Search
http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=franconi+ICOM&btnG=Search&hl=en
http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=uml+owl&btnG=Search&hl=en

None of this, of course, shows that the UML-OWL one isn't novel in  
some sense. Who knows?

Personally, I wouldn't be thrilled with a patent for a relatively  
trivial variant. But would I be happier with a patent on a variant  
that captured the semantics in a substantially better way? Can you  
patent a mapping? (That just seems like a mathematical function...)

Cheers,
Bijan.

Elisa,

Just for my curiosity, I was wondering if you would mind commenting on:
        http://www.google.com/patents?id=NR6XAAAAEBAJ
It seems like it would be pretty easy to infringe upon. Particularly  
claim 3:
"""3. A method for creating an ontology in UML, the method including:

accepting as input an ontology name and one or more ontology elements,  
each ontology element corresponding to at least one of a term,  
concept, and relationship between concepts, the ontology elements  
forming a detailed specification of the ontology;

generating a logically equivalent ontology with UML model elements  
based on a UML profile grounded in a foundation ontology; and

presenting the resulting ontology to a user in a UML environment."""

That also seems to fall on prior art (at the very least, the second  
and third parts seem to fall with ICOM).

How does this patent relate to the ODM work? (OMG has a royalty-free/
RAND requirement on IP.)

Cheers,
Bijan.

Hi Bijan,

I hadn't intended to point this out myself (since I'm assuming the folks
who we've been exchanging email with have seen it and don't believe that
it is an issue for their work), but thanks.

We had what we believed were some key insights years ago, confirmed with
Grady Booch in fact, that led us to believe that in order to create a
"proper" mapping from a UML model to OWL, you needed to understand more
about the semantics of the model than might be available from
traditional reverse engineering.  This was early work to tease out some
of the issues, including the need for not only a of the language
metamodel but an ontology of critical terminology in order to "do the
right thing".  We still use this approach in our tools, but have refined
it significantly since 2000/2001 when we did the original research, as
you might expect.  The approach covers the combination of the
methodology and the transformation to OWL (or other things).  It
predates ODM substantially, but our current work has been updated to
support parts of the standard.

When we submitted our inputs to ODM (and since, with subsequent updates
to the standard), we agreed to license any relevant patents to anyone
who was interested at reasonable commercial rates.  That would include
the one you found.  We are also planning to contribute some of the work
to an emerging Eclipse project, the Eclipse/MDT project, and hope to get
the ODM metamodels, profiles, and APIs out in the Galileo release coming
out next month, fyi.  None of those components require a license to our
patent from a usage perspective.

Best,

Elisa

Bijan Parsia wrote:

One more point on ICOM -- we actually saw Enrico's tool at the first
ISWC at Stanford in 2001, but only well after we had initiated our work
- we believe he was working essentially in parallel with us.  Where we
started from a UML tooling base, Enrico started from FaCT and worked the
other way (at least, that's my recollection).  The supporting work on
our patent includes material that dates back to 2000 and earlier, and
came out of research we did on the DARPA/RASSP program in the late 1990s
in OMT (Jim Rumbaugh's object-oriented modeling methodology that was
part of what he brought to the UML table).

Thanks,

Elisa

Bijan Parsia wrote:

On 4/5/09 17:41, Elisa Kendall wrote:
Did anyone go ahead and license the patents commercially? What
definition of "reasonable" are you following?

Dan


> the one you found. We are also planning to contribute some of the work
> to an emerging Eclipse project, the Eclipse/MDT project, and hope to get
> the ODM metamodels, profiles, and APIs out in the Galileo release coming
> out next month, fyi. None of those components require a license to our
> patent from a usage perspective.

On 4 May 2009, at 16:41, Elisa Kendall wrote:

> Hi Bijan,
>
> I hadn't intended to point this out myself (since I'm assuming the  
> folks who we've been exchanging email with have seen it and don't  
> believe that it is an issue for their work), but thanks.

It was the first think I pointed out, almost :) I'm not sure that  
you'd really want to *thank* me, since I'm not clear what's  
meritorious about your patent.

> We had what we believed were some key insights years ago, confirmed  
> with Grady Booch in fact, that led us to believe that in order to  
> create a "proper" mapping from a UML model to OWL, you needed to  
> understand more about the semantics of the model than might be  
> available from traditional reverse engineering.

I think that for any forward mapping from UML to OWL you can consider:
        The generic semantics of UML (what most of the work on "reasoning  
over UML class diagrams" focus on). I don't see how this is  
legitimately patentable in the context of all the work that exists.
        Trying to capture the "intent" of the diagrams (e.g., via some  
analysis of the labels, using auxiliary ontologies, etc.) I guess I  
could imagine *some* of these being patentable, if they were fairly  
specific. I mean, "Translate to OWL then enhance" just seems too  
broad. Obviously, if you can "enhance" in *some* way or another,  
that'd be good. But I can imagine trying to enhance using NLP on the  
labels and mapping them into wordnet, etc. or looking at code  
instantiations of the model. But again, I'd want the procedure to be  
pretty deterministic and specific.

>  This was early work to tease out some of the issues, including the  
> need for not only a of the language metamodel but an ontology of  
> critical terminology in order to "do the right thing".

I guess I'm still not seeing what's special about the *technique* as  
so described. (Admittedly, the description is pretty sketchy.) I could  
see that the "ontology of critical terminology" might be valuable  
(since, presumably, it'd make or break the translation), but that  
seems to be something for copyright or a trade secret, not a matter of  
patent. I mean, do you think your patent covers *any* use of an  
auxiliary ontology in the translation?

>  We still use this approach in our tools, but have refined it  
> significantly since 2000/2001 when we did the original research, as  
> you might expect.

Is there a readable account, e.g., a whitepaper?

> The approach covers the combination of the methodology and the  
> transformation to OWL (or other things).  It predates ODM  
> substantially, but our current work has been updated to support  
> parts of the standard.

I guess the question is whether one can use ODM without infringing on  
your patent. Or perhaps what one must not do to avoid infringement.

> When we submitted our inputs to ODM (and since, with subsequent  
> updates to the standard), we agreed to license any relevant patents  
> to anyone who was interested at reasonable commercial rates.  That  
> would include the one you found.

Ok, so you selected "RAND" instead of "royalty free". If I wrote an  
XSLT that translated UML diagrams into OWL that is aligned with a  
foundational ontology (something along the lines of <http://www.sfu.ca/~dgasevic/projects/UMLtoOWL/ 
 >) do I need a license?

>  We are also planning to contribute some of the work to an emerging  
> Eclipse project, the Eclipse/MDT project, and hope to get the ODM  
> metamodels, profiles, and APIs out in the Galileo release coming out  
> next month, fyi.  None of those components require a license to our  
> patent from a usage perspective.

You mean that you've licensed to Eclipse the technology so they can  
distribute it? But if someone released a similar project (e.g., for  
NetBeans) they should come to you for a license?

Does TopQuandrent have a license? Does their UML conversion infringe?

Do you think the UML-OWL Generator at least *prima facie* infringes?  
If not, why not?  How about ICOM?

Cheers,
Bijan.

Hi Dan,

We've never been approached.  Several UML vendors have talked with us
about building plug-ins for their tools, which we did originally for
Rose and are migrating to MagicDraw, EA RSA, etc., which may be one
reason.  I think the real reason has been limited demand, though.  If
IBM had enough requests, we would have heard from them in one way or
another about it by now.  As it is, we get a few requests via their
partner program now and again.  Since the first of this year, we've seen
more interest from users of a couple of the vendors in particular, but
that's very recent (from our perspective).  Most of our customers are
either government or very large businesses who have really difficult
problems to solve in information architecture, already have a large
developer base in UML, and know of us through OMG.  We also have
customers who are long-time Protege users, who need the UML either to
submit to projects like caBIG or a variety of diagrams to explain
complex ontologies to their customers/users. There is clearly a larger
potential audience -- but most have not recognized that separation of
concerns in the services they are producing includes separating the
terminology and information infrastructure from the source code.  That's
still a real stretch for most mainstream development organizations, even
if they do use UML.

A few weeks ago I made a presentation at Enterprise Data World in Tampa
with a colleague from JPL, and at that same conference there were a
number of discussions on why there hasn't been more interaction between
the data management community and Semantic Web technologies -- I would
argue that the same reason holds there -- there simply hasn't been as
much demand as we all thought there would be, at least not yet, in part
due to the need for more cross-disciplinary education.

In any case, it's very interesting that someone thinks there is a demand
for this -- I will look forward, as you might imagine, to hearing more
about that.

Best,

Elisa



Dan Brickley wrote:

Hi Bijan,

Bijan Parsia wrote: The analysis requires more than this as it turns out, there are a number
of patterns that tend to work at a high level, but many organizations
have their own profiles, best practices, preferred patterns, and so
forth that are also relevant, in addition to controlled vocabularies.  
UML is really very large, covering considerable ground on the behavioral
side, and there are also an increasing number of metamodels and other
profiles (e.g., SysML, SoaML, BPMN, etc.) that are relevant to any
transformation, particularly if customers apply one or more of them to
the model that they then want to transform to OWL.  We did originally
use some NLP capabilities to extract terms, and may do so again, but
even that has to be applied -after- you understand the patterns in the
model.  Most other UML-OWL transformation approaches we've seen support
logical models only -- the class diagrams, but there are several
additional diagrams for which the semantics are quite useful (e.g., use
case diagrams, state diagrams, component diagrams, etc.).

Note that we started working on these ideas in 1996, with an original
target of UML-KIF, not OWL, which did not exist at the time.  Some of
the basis for our work is derived from there, and included some support
for rules originally, which we're also now revisiting in light of RIF,
PRR at OMG, etc. Yes -- it's integral, in fact.
>
>>  We still use this approach in our tools, but have refined it
>> significantly since 2000/2001 when we did the original research, as
>> you might expect.
>
> Is there a readable account, e.g., a whitepaper?
Nothing that would provide the level of detail you're interested in at
this point - we haven't had the bandwidth to write one.  We're talking
with JPL about doing so later this summer, though, if we have sufficient
time and resources.  If we do, we'll certainly post it or submit it to
an appropriate conference.
>
>> The approach covers the combination of the methodology and the
>> transformation to OWL (or other things).  It predates ODM
>> substantially, but our current work has been updated to support parts
>> of the standard.
>
> I guess the question is whether one can use ODM without infringing on
> your patent. Or perhaps what one must not do to avoid infringement.
There is nothing inherent in using ODM that would infringe on our
patent.  Many UML tools support importing UML profiles and allowing
users to apply them to their models, in fact.  It's only if one wants to
import/export OWL, from a UML tool, using a metamodel, profile, and
ontologies in the way that we've done that there is a possibility of
infringement. No. We're donating it to the Eclipse foundation under the Eclipse license,
and anyone can reuse it.  The pieces we are providing to Eclipse will be
royalty free, and are useful without requiring application of our patent.
>
> Does TopQuandrent have a license? Does their UML conversion infringe?
They have not licensed our patent, but the last time I saw their tool,
they rendered diagrams that were (1) not really UML, although they do
use boxes and arrows, and (2) not editable.  Even if they produce UML
(more likely XMI) which can be imported into a UML tool, they would
likely not be infringing, but I'd have to understand what they are doing
better to be sure.
>
> Do you think the UML-OWL Generator at least *prima facie* infringes?
> If not, why not?  How about ICOM?
The UML-OWL Generator -could- be infringing, but there is not enough
information available to be sure.  If it does, the patent examiner will
probably find it long before it publishes.  The one we worked with was
quite good, found a number of papers that helped him understand what we
were doing, the potential benefits, precise wording of claims, etc.  I
don't believe ICOM does (if it hasn't changed substantially in the last
couple of years).

Best,

Elisa
>
> Cheers,
> Bijan.
>
>

Thanks Elisa. That's very interested. As you know, my brain seems to  
resist UML, so these sorts of discussions are helpful indeed.

On 4 May 2009, at 20:24, Elisa Kendall wrote:

> Hi Bijan,
>
> Bijan Parsia wrote:
>> On 4 May 2009, at 16:41, Elisa Kendall wrote:
[snip]
> The analysis requires more than this as it turns out, there are a  
> number of patterns that tend to work at a high level,

The idea of higher level patterns is interesting. It seems like you  
might be able to infer them post translation.

> but many organizations have their own profiles, best practices,  
> preferred patterns, and so forth that are also relevant, in addition  
> to controlled vocabularies.

Sure. But then we're not really talking about *translating* UML are  
we? It's more like capturing (more of) the model with UML as the center.
[snip]

Sure, but again there seem to be different things one could do, e.g.,
        1) translate all *those* diagrams into their logical counterparts
        2) use those other diagrams to generate a *different* translation of  
the class diagrams than you would otherwise

It seems that you do 2.

I'm confused. So, if I translate a UML diagram into an OWL ontology  
and align that ontology to DOLCE, I infringe?

Cool. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

This is one thing...

> in the way that we've done

...and this is the other. What I don't quite understand is what would  
be a way of doing it that isn't "the way you've done".  What you said  
above seems to make it that *any* use of an auxiliary ontology is  
infringing.

Ok! But that seems to contradict the above. (This is very reassuring,  
btw.)

Excellent.

>> Does TopQuandrent have a license? Does their UML conversion infringe?
> They have not licensed our patent, but the last time I saw their  
> tool, they rendered diagrams that were (1) not really UML, although  
> they do use boxes and arrows, and (2) not editable.  Even if they  
> produce UML (more likely XMI) which can be imported into a UML tool,  
> they would likely not be infringing, but I'd have to understand what  
> they are doing better to be sure.

Ok! (This makes me more interested in what you're doing :))

>> Do you think the UML-OWL Generator at least *prima facie*  
>> infringes? If not, why not?  How about ICOM?
> The UML-OWL Generator -could- be infringing, but there is not enough  
> information available to be sure.  If it does, the patent examiner  
> will probably find it long before it publishes.  The one we worked  
> with was quite good, found a number of papers that helped him  
> understand what we were doing, the potential benefits, precise  
> wording of claims, etc.  I don't believe ICOM does (if it hasn't  
> changed substantially in the last couple of years).

The main change in ICOM 2 is that instead of ER diagrams it uses  
UML(ish?) class diagrams.
        http://www.inf.unibz.it/~franconi/papers/dl-06.pdf
I believe it uses the standard mapping from UML to SHIQ.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Hi Bijan,

Bijan Parsia wrote:
> Thanks Elisa. That's very interested. As you know, my brain seems to
> resist UML, so these sorts of discussions are helpful indeed.
You're clearly not the only one :).  We /still/ come up with questions
on both sides of the problem (UML as well as OWL) given that it's nature
is "round peg, square hole", at levels of detail that still make my head
hurt at times. I agree, although we've also found what I'll describe as "diagrammatic
patterns", where multiple patterns might render the same (or similar)
OWL, but are useful in figuring out how to translate the model in ways
that might be abstracted away in OWL.  We have not yet developed
ontologies that would capture this kind of pattern, though the intention
is to do so.  Diagram definition in UML needs work (there is an
outstanding RFP for this that friends are working on at present, in
fact), so we may wait until there is a potential for more consistency
before tackling that.
>
>> but many organizations have their own profiles, best practices,
>> preferred patterns, and so forth that are also relevant, in addition
>> to controlled vocabularies.
>
> Sure. But then we're not really talking about *translating* UML are
> we? It's more like capturing (more of) the model with UML as the center.
Well -- we still want to translate as much as is possible  (or useful)
to OWL, for model consistency checking and validation for example, and
also provide a means to provide feedback to the modeler for further
separation of concerns, pattern application/reuse, etc. Currently, but the intent is to also do 1 for certain kinds of diagrams
over the coming months, especially for the use case and state diagrams,
to support specific customer needs from a requirements / objectives /
planning perspective. No -- only if you use the ontology as part of the transformation process
(I think, if I understand what you're saying), and only if the
transformation met other criteria. No -- see my comment above regarding the alignment question. I'll have to re-read the paper, but I doubt that it would based on what
I recall.

Elisa
>
> Cheers,
> Bijan.
>
>

On 4 May 2009, at 22:10, Elisa Kendall wrote:

> Hi Bijan,
>
> Bijan Parsia wrote:
>> Thanks Elisa. That's very interested. As you know, my brain seems  
>> to resist UML, so these sorts of discussions are helpful indeed.
> You're clearly not the only one :).

Misery loves company...

>  We /still/ come up with questions on both sides of the problem (UML  
> as well as OWL) given that it's nature is "round peg, square hole",  
> at levels of detail that still make my head hurt at times.

:)

[snip]
[snip]

So what's the difference between:
        A) AlignWith(Translate2OWL(UML), DOLCE) (where the output is an  
ontology aligned with DOLCE)
and
        B) Translate2OWLWithOntology(UML, DOLCE) (where the output is an  
ontology aligned with DOLCE)

Or to put it another way, what's the value add of using the ontology  
"as part of the transformation"? What different sorts of output do you  
get?

Cheers,
Bijan.