Leveraging SPARQL Queries for UML Consistency Checking

Context and motivation: Multiple-viewed requirements modeling method describes the system to-be from different perspectives. Some requirements models are then specified in various UML diagrams. Question/problem: Managing those models can be tedious and error-prone, since a lot of CASE tools provide poor support for reasoning and consistency checking. Principal ideas/results: Ontology is a formal notation for describing concepts and their relations in a domain. Since software requirements are a kind of knowledge, we propose to adopt a knowledge engineering approach for managing the consistency of requirements models. In this paper, an ontology for three most commonly used UML diagrams is developed in Web Ontology Language (OWL). The transformation of UML class, sequence and state diagrams to OWL knowledge base is presented. Owing to the underlying logical reasoning capability of OWL, a semantic query language, SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language), is used to query the knowledge base for consistency checking. Contribution: This paper introduces a semantic web-based knowledge engineering approach to represent and manage software requirements knowledge in OWL. By experimenting with a concrete software system, we demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of this knowledge approach.