Transforming yEd diagrams in OWL ontologies

DiTTO, which stands for Diagrams Transformation inTo OWL (version 1.1, dated 25 March 2014), is a Web application that is able to translate diagrams expressed either in E/R crow’s foot notation or Graffoo and created with yEd, an open source application to quickly and effectively generate high-quality diagrams, into OWL ontologies.

If you choose to specify E/R diagrams, DiTTO allows one to choose what E/R semantics to apply for the transformation according to three alternative conversion strategies, which depends on the application of two assumptions:

• global semantics (GS) is a characteristic of OWL ontologies (but not typically of E/R), and has the effect of unifying the formal interpretation of domain and range axioms, property characteristics, and all the restrictions that act at a global level. When GS does not hold, one is not allowed to assume such unification, even when the axioms regard two constants with the same name;
• unique name assumption (UNA), which is a characteristic in E/R semantics (but not of OWL), and whose consequence is that two objects named differently always refer to different entities in the world.

In particular, the minimal strategy interprets the semantics of E/R in its purest form by not using GS, while using UNA, the intermediate strategy does not use either GS or UNA, and finally the maximal strategy, which is the closest to OWL semantics, use GS, but UNA does not hold.

Additional materials

DiTTO is an open source tool hosted by GitHub. The exemplar yEd diagrams, in E/R crow's foot and Graffoo, described in the following pictures are available (E/R diagram and Graffoo diagram) so as to test the service.

Publications

• Gangemi, A., Peroni, S. (2013). DiTTO: Diagrams Transformation inTo OWL. In Proceedings of the ISWC 2013 Posters & Demos Track (ISWC-PD 2013), CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Aachen, Germany: CEUR-WS.org. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1035/iswc2013_demo_2.pdf.

About the authors

Silvio Peroni (Ph.D.) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna, and, for this project, part-time collaborator with the Semantic Technologies Lab at CNR (i.e. the Italian National Research Council). He created and maintains DiTTO, and he have developed the XSLT files to convert E/R diagrams into OWL.

Riccardo Falco has a Bachelor Degree in Computer Science. His Bachelor Thesis concerned the extension of DiTTO with additional XSLT files to convert Graffoo diagrams into OWL.