A Modeling Infrastructure for OntoUML

This work provides an infrastructure for a philosophically and cognitively well-founded modeling language, named OntoUML, which is an extension of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). First, we review the abstract syntax of OntoUML (the language’s metamodel) in order to accommodate the rules for extending UML 2. Then, we design a graphical editor in order to allow users to manipulate the concrete syntax and create OntoUML models. In the sequel, we design a reference metamodel that is solely dedicated to abstract syntax elements and contains constraints for ensuring that a model is syntactically correct. The goal is to make a metamodel that does not depend on any specific graphical editor technology and is the core of activities such as model transformations that relate OntoUML to other languages. In order to connect the graphical editing with syntax validation, we provide a transformation from our graphical editor’s metamodel to the reference metamodel. Moreover, we provide a similar transformation relating a graphical editor defined in a previous work with the reference metamodel. Thus, we provide a modeling infrastructure for OntoUML that assists the editing, syntax validation and transformation of models.