Let us start with a simple example. Assume we have a Person class, which models a person that has a name. Let us just think about what this means. If we think of our domain of interest and we list all the objects of the domain, some objects will belong to a set that is a subset of the domain of interest, which is called the Person set, which is represented by our Person class. Our Person class also has a name attribute of type String, but it is likely that we will have other classes in our domain that may have a name attribute of type String. Thus, the Person class represents objects that are a subset of all the objects in the domain that have a name attribute of type String. This is shown in the Venn diagram below.

Note that the Person class is not necessarily a strict subset of the objects that have a name attribute of type String. It is possible that the Person class is the only class in our domain that has a name attribute of type String, in which case these two sets are in fact equal.

The OWL 2 equivalent representation in Manchester syntax is given in the image below. Note that for the name attribute in the UML class we have defined a related DataProperty. Furthermore, a Person class is also defined, which is defined as SubClassOf: name some xsd:string. What this means is that individuals that belongs to the Person class also belongs to the class of individuals that have a name property of type xsd:string. Thus, the Person class is a subclass of the class representing individuals that have a name property of type xsd:string.