Abstract. The Web Ontology Language OWL is a prominent ontology language for specifying ontologies. Although OWL ontologies are wellused for representing and reasoning about knowledge in various domains, they are sparsely studied for visual language specification. The work in this paper, therefore, explores OWL for visual language specification by specifying the concrete syntax of selected UML class diagram notations in an ontology. The selected diagram notations are specified as spatial configurations of primitive elements and qualitative base spatial relationships of Region Connection Calculus-8 (RCC-8). Furthermore, the automated reasoning features of ontology reasoners are investigated to verify the completeness and the correctness of the specification. The verification results indicate that the given specification needs to be revised to support applications to draw the selected notations. The value of such a specification in supporting a semantic diagram interpretation application is demonstrated using the automated instance classification feature of ontology reasoners.
Diagrams are widely used in our day to day communication. A knowledge of the spatial patterns used in diagrams is essential to read and understand them. In the context of diagrams, spatial patterns mean accepted spatial arrangements of graphical and textual elements used to represent diagram-specific concepts. In order to assist with the automated understanding of diagrams by computer applications, this paper presents an ontology-based approach to recognise diagram-specific concepts from the spatial patterns in diagrams. Specifically, relevant spatial patterns of diagrams are encoded in an ontology, and the automated instance classification feature of the ontology reasoners is utilised to map spatial patterns to diagram-specific concepts depicted in a diagram. A prototype of this approach to support automated recognition of UML and domain concepts from class diagrams and its performance are also discussed in this paper. This paper concludes with a reflection of the strengths and limitations of the proposed approach.
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