UML for ontology development

Ontologies are becoming increasingly important because they provide the critical semantic foundation for many rapidly expanding technologies such as software agents, e-commerce and knowledge management (McGuinness, 2002). The Unified Modelling Language (UML)1 has been widely adopted by the software engineering community and its scope is broadening to include more diverse modelling tasks. This paper discusses the recent convergence of UML and ontologies and suggests some possible future directions.