The UML back-end plug-in provides an import and export mechanism between the Protege knowledge model and the object-oriented modeling language UML. In particular, it enables the exchange of ontologies and UML class diagrams, so that Protege can be used in conjunction with traditional Software Engineering tools, including CASE tools and Integrated Development Environments. (5XN)
Installation (5XO)
Get binary distribution compiled for Protege 3.3.1. (7K8)
To get newer versions of the plugin, e.g., that works with Protege 3.4, please go to the new wiki. (AVD)
In order to properly install this plug-in, unzip the contents of the ZIP file into your <protege-install-dir>/plugins directory. Make sure to preserve the path information in the ZIP file, otherwise the plug-in won't load properly. (7K6)
Documentation (5XS)
Please note that this plug-in is not a full back-end because the UML export only stores those parts of the ontology that can be easily expressed in UML. Users should not fully rely on the files produced by this back-end, but store copies of the ontologies with conventional storage mechanisms such as CLIPS. A particular limitation of the current version is that it is based on UML 1.4, while most available CASE tools still seem to operate only on the older 1.3 version. (5XT)
Read about the technical approach used to develop this plug-in. (5XU)
Read the User's Guide. (5XV)
Screenshots (5XW)
Like most back-end plug-ins, this plug-in does not provide a user interface (tab). Instead you can create UML files using the "Save in format..." menu item. (5XX)
To follow is a screenshot of the famous Newspaper example exported to Poseidon UML. Note that this tool does not recognize the UML Enumeration type for the ontology's Symbol slots, but displays their type as "null". (5XY)
The following diagram (please click on the link provided below to view the diagram) was reverse-engineered from the original metamodel in Protege using a slightly modified version of this plug-in (the plug-in normally excludes the meta classes from export). (5Y0)
http://protege.stanford.edu/plugins/uml/images/Protege-MetaModel.pdf (5Y1)
Author (5Y2)
Holger Knublauch (holger at knublauch dot com) (5Y3)
Level of Support (5Y4)
This plug-in is no longer under active development. If you have questions, you can try posting a message to the protege-discussion mailing list and someone from the Protege community may be able to help you. (5Y5)
The source code for this plug-in is available in the Protege Subversion repository. (7K7)
License (5Y6)
The UML Backend and its source code (like Protege) are freely available under the open source Mozilla Public License. (5Y7)