Complete Meta-Model as UML?

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ulfl
Posts: 15
Joined: 01 Feb 2010, 10:47

Is there a way to get/export an UML diagram of the complete Meta-Model? I would like to provide a UML diagram only containing the classes relevant to our purposes (a subset of the complete Meta-Model). Do I have to model it myself (e.g. using Visio)?
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

You can export the entire Protege ontology as UML 1.4 and then use your favourite UML tool to browse/share the meta model as UML.

The UML Backend plugin for Protege works well. This has no user interface as such, rather you open your in Protege and then select File->Export and select UML 1.4. The plugin will then ask you to specify a target XMI file.

Once it has completed, you can then open the XMI tool in any UML compliant tool. I've just tried it with ArgoUML.

The export creates a UML model called 'ProtegeModel' and it is in here that you will find all the classes of the meta model. This model contains two packages, one called 'java' which defines the Java basic types and one called 'ProtegeOntology', which is where the meta model classes live.

You can then select any classes from the ProtegeOntology package and quickly create any UML Class Diagram that you need. You could drag all the classes onto the diagram but it is probably easier to use by creating separate class diagrams to show particular areas of the meta model or task-oriented views. Which ever approach you take, having all the classes and relationships defined makes creating the class diagrams very easy.

It's likely that we will start to use this on the website for automatically creating the graphical documentation of the meta model.

Hopefully, this gives you everything that you need but let me know how you get on.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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