Somewhat tangential to Gregor's question, but maybe of interest:
There are tools available to convert ISO 19109-compliant UML models to GML, which would address WFS applications that use our models. One such can be downloaded from:
http://www.interactive-instruments.de/ugas/
... and for information:
http://www.interactive-instruments.de/ugas/ShapeChange.pdf
I don't know of such tools for RDF, but I suspect they exist now or will soon.
Flip
On Mar 29, 2006, at 12:33 PM, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
Donald wrote:
In both cases, I would of course recommend that we model our objects using a more neutral language such as UML and then generate the encoding models we actually use. After that here are the two options I see (not in any order of priority).
UML would be absolutely excellent. However do we have tools that support this?
For SDD we failed to communicate in UML, partly because people wanted example documents that looked like the html they got so used to, and partly because at some stage the complexity could not be handled by manually synchronizing two separate forms of expression. However, tools for UML to w3c schema seem to be rather experimental and not well available. Or perhaps we just did not find them?
(Actually, both TCS and UBIF/SDD use w3c schema in a way that corresponds to UML static class diagrams (and are built on class definitions). SDD is built with the assumption that someone wants to create a 1:1 mapping of JAVA classes, including type derivation, extension, and type-polymorphism. However, it is clear that w3c-schema is a hodgepodge compromise, and I guess that makes a general UML/w3c-schema mapping difficult.
Is there a good UML editor that exports RDFS/OWL? One that we can use? One that we can use in discussions between information scientists and biologists?
If we can forget about RDF/S and simply use a UML tools for all relevant discussions (AND for defining the constraints we consider necessary), and the product of this discussion can then automatically be turned into RDF, I would *love RDF*. (Some comments about using text-editors to edit RDF, however, point me into the opposite direction).
Perhaps also schema-driven applications can be built, similar to what CASTOR is for Java and w3c-xml-schema?
Then it really does not matter that RDF/S in my view has a much steeper learning curve and higher level of abstraction than xml itself - because it is software that handles it.
Gregor---------------------------------------------------------- Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn@bba.de) Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA) Königin-Luise-Str. 19 Tel: +49-30-8304-2220 14195 Berlin, Germany Fax: +49-30-8304-2203
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