Documentation for ODM

[M Carter]

I am an ontologist working with EA to generate documentation and requirements for an ontology. I have been playing around with the ODM extension but there is insufficient information for me to develop a validated .owl or .rdf file that replicates an ontology developed using OWL2 DL.

Is there additional documentation that will help me build an ontology in EA?

[aldrich]

Please post if you find out anything; I'm about to do something similar.

Thanks,
Aldrich

[Glassboy]

There is this whitepaper http://community.sparxsystems.com/white-papers/764-odm-mdg-technology-whitepaper

To be honest tho' I found a number of problems starting with not being able to create a sameas relationship from myThing to owlThing.

I was told that changes were being made to improve the OWL\RDF capabilities and I passed on the link to FIBO OWL, UML XMI, and ODM XMI files as a benchmark.

I haven't tested 12.1 but I don't remember seeing anything in the release notes that led me to thing the OWL\RDF MDG has been improved.

[M Carter]

I am looking at the white paper right now. What I did find is the EA uses the OMG specification for ODM. http://www.omg.org/spec/ODM/1.1/PDF.
The specification is comprehensive (as one may expect from the Object Management Group) but it does not discuss the MDG implementation directly.

There are several differences between the ODM and OWL design implementations. One interesting one is the use of a class called singleton. It is not in OWL but is part of ODM.  Another interesting thing is the owl import requirements.  Another interesting tidbit is that asymmetric axioms are not part of the schema as far as I have seen.

Dermot O’Bryan respond to my query in reference to an .owl import failure that:

"Your top-level (root) element of RDF/OWL file needs be rdf:RDF, so you need: <!DOCTYPE rdf:RDF [... rather than <!DOCTYPE Ontology"

I generated an owl ontology and exported it to see how it was defined. The export stated:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#">
<owl:Ontology rdf:ID="myModel">
<rdfs:comment>Test ccomment</rdfs:comment>
<owl:versionInfo>1.0</owl:versionInfo>
</owl:Ontology>

This is significantly different from owl syntax.  The rdf import worked fine but the structure is not what an ontologist may want to document or express.

I like the capability but the documentation is incomplete, as far as I have seen. There is a great deal of flexibility but not enough description of the different fields. Will update as I find out more.

[edit]ModEdit: Switched off smilies[/edit]