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I am trying to represent a metamodel using OWL/RDF but I need to make sure that I use the correct OWL elements to describe my metamodel elements.

My metamodel has node and connector elements. All of them have properties/attributes (non-OWL sense).

Views are essentially sets of triples using instances of metamodel triples.

Are the following statements correct:

  1. Metamodel node element Mn would be represented by an OWL Class
  2. Metamodel node element Mn is an individual of an OWL Thing
  3. Metamodel connector element Mc would be represented by an OWL ObjectProperty
  4. Metamodel attribute/property element Ma would be represented by an OWL DatatypeProperty
  5. A model view (mv) is an individual of a Metamodel View element (Mv - an OWL Class)
  6. A model view comprises a collection or set of triples (that are individuals of Metamodel Triple [an OWL Class])

Is there a visualisation of the OWL metamodel (i.e an E-R-like diagram with triples) as it's easier to see the scope/set compared with text triples within a document?

Is there a choice to be made wrt flavour of OWL to use? Presumably not OWL Lite because equivalence cannot be asserted.

wikitect
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  • I think the first question you need to answer is whether you need to use [OWL vs RDF]([OWL vs RDF](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1740341/what-is-the-difference-between-rdf-and-owl)). Roughly OWL will allow for richer inferences from reasoning whereas RDF is better at dealing with large numbers of triples. To make this decision you will need to have a clear idea of the use cases you want your meta model to support. You could potentially use UML for visualizing your meta model. On my website there is a reference for UML to OWL [translation](https://henrietteharmse.com/uml-vs-owl/). – Henriette Harmse Nov 10 '20 at 17:33
  • I don't understand this. An RDF/XML document describing an ontology can contain both rdfs: and owl: triples. There is no point in my using UML because I have a complete description as a graph within a Neo4J database and hence each view / visalisation is already the product of a CYPHER query. The problem is understand the output serialization so I can construct the relevant queries. – wikitect Nov 16 '20 at 08:52

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