Category Archives: Conceptual modelling

Associations between Classes

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This far we have only considered UML classes where the attributes are primitive types rather than classes. Here we will consider UML classes that have classes as attributes. Assume we want to model projects. Assume a project must have one name, one sponsor that must be a manager and it must have a team of between 3 and 10 employees. In UML this can be stated using attributes (see Fig.1(a)) or associations (see Fig. 1(b)). For interest sake Wazlawick [1] suggests using attribute notation for data types and associations for classes. His motivation is that associations makes dependencies between classes more apparent. I usually follow this guideline myself.

Fig. 1

Fig. 1

The OWL representation for these 2 class diagrams is given in Fig. 2. The first thing to notice is that we use ObjectProperty instead of DataProperty to represent the sponsor attribute/association. Similar for the team attribute/association. Our property definitions also now have Domain and Range restrictions. When we say that Susan is the sponsor for ABC, we can infer that Susan is a manager and ABC is project. This information can be captured through Domain and Range restrictions. For the purpose of finding modeling errors in it is preferable to add Domain and Range restrictions.

Association between Classes Manchester

Fig. 2

To limit the number of employees on a team to between 3 and 10 employees we use the property cardinality restrictions team min 3 owl:Thing and team max 10 owl:Thing. It may seem strange that we use team max 10 owl:Thing rather than team max 10 Employee. Surely we want to restrict team members to employees? Well true, but that is achieved through our range restriction on the team object property. Here we restricting our team to 10 whatever classes and the range restriction will infer that the team must be of type Employee.

References

1. R. S. Wazlawick, Object-oriented Analysis and Design for Information Systems: Modeling with UML, OCL and IFML, Morgan Kaufmann, 2014.

 

Inheritance

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In this post we will look at how different types of inheritance can be translated to OWL. We consider the case where Person is specialized by Employee and Client (Fig. 1). In a UML class diagram if inheritance is not annotated the default annotation {incomplete, disjoint} is assumed. incomplete means there are instances of Person which are neither of type Employee nor Client. disjoint means there is no instance of Person that is both of type Employee and of type Client. The set representation is given in Fig. 2 and the OWL translation in Fig. 3.

InheritanceDefault

Fig. 1

InheritanceDefaultSet

Fig. 2

InheritanceDefaultOWL

Fig. 3

The annotation {complete, disjoint} means every instance of Person is either a instance of Employee or an instance of Client(Fig. 4). The corresponding Venn diagram is  given in Fig. 5 and the OWL translation in Fig. 6.

InheritanceCompleteDisjoint

Fig. 4

InheritanceCompleteDisjointSet

Fig. 5

InheritanceCompleteDisjointOWL

Fig. 6

When overlapping is used rather than disjoint it means an instance of Person may be both of type Employee and of type Client.  Fig. 7 – 9 provides a UML class diagram, Venn diagram and OWL translation as example for the annotation {incomplete, overlapping}. Fig. 10 – 12 provides a UML class diagram, Venn diagram and OWL translation as example for the annotation {complete, overlapping}.

InheritanceIncompleteOverlapping

Fig. 7

InheritanceIncompleteOverlappingSet

Fig. 8

InheritanceIncompleteOverlappingOWL

Fig. 9

InheritanceCompleteOverlapping

Fig. 10

InheritanceCompleteOverlappingSet

Fig. 11

InheritanceCompleteOverlappingOWL

Fig. 12

A Brief Introduction to Protégé and Reasoners

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A question you rightfully may be pondering is: Why translate object oriented classes into OWL? The answer is that it can help you to find logical inconsistencies in your class designs. In this post I will introduce the tools that will eventually enable you to find logical inconsistencies in your class designs.

The tool we will use is called Protégé. Download and installations instructions for Protégé can be found at https://protegewiki.stanford.edu/wiki/Install_Protege5.

In this post I will provide two screencasts:

  1. In the first screencast I will show you how to enter the OWL representation of the Person class introduced in the previous post.
  2. In the second screencast I will show you how to run a reasoner and how an inconsistency can arise.

On to the first screencast:

  1. Create a Person class.
  2. Create the data properties.
    1. name
    2. surname
    3. age
  3. Through sub-classing state that the Person class necessarily have a
    1. name,
    2. surname and
    3. age.
  4. If we run the reasoner on this ontology, no inconsistencies will be found.

In the second screencast I show how an inconsistency can arise. The steps are as follows:

  1. Create an individual called sarah of type Person.
  2. Run the reasoner. You will see the reasoner give no errors (nothing happened). This may come as a surprise to you since we have not set the name, surname or age data properties for the individual called sarah. In OWL this behaviour is expected due to what is called the open world assumption. OWL makes no assumption with regards to knowledge that is not stated explicitly. Since we did not state that the sarah individual does not have, for example, a name, the reasoner found no error in our ontology. This is different from typical database behaviour where absence of information is often assumed to indicate that the information does not exist, which is referred to as the closed world assumption.
  3. Now let us change our sarah individual to state that it does not have a name. This is achieved by stating that the sarah individual is of type name max 0 xsd:string. This states that the sarah individual can have a maximum of 0 name data properties of type xsd:string.
    SarahDoesNotHaveName
  4. If we run the reasoner now it shows that we have an inconsistency. We can ask Protégé to explain the inconsistency.ExplainSarahInconsistency
  5. The explanation states that sarah is of type Person and of type name max 0 xsd:string. But Person is a subclass of name some xsd:string. This states that individuals of type Person must have at least 1 name property of type xsd:string. Hence, the reason for the inconsistency.

 

Admittedly this example is contrived: there is not much sense in creating a Person class which we state must have a name and then create an individual of type Person which we then state does not have a name. But this was done here to show you how to use a reasoner to find inconsistencies in your ontology and to show you what information you can expect when your ontology is inconsistent.