MDG Technology for ODM

MDG Technology for ODM is the implementation of the Object Management Group's Ontology Definition Metamodel for Enterprise Architect. It provides ontology modeling capabilities within Enterprise Architect (9.2 or later), enabling you to develop large-scale ontologies within the fully-integrated modeling environment, for your project domain.

Through the MDG Technology for ODM, you have access to these features:

A UML Profile for the Resource Description Framework (RDF)
A UML Profile for Web Ontology Language (OWL)
Customized diagram types and toolbox pages, for convenient access to elements and relationships to model ontologies and resources effectively
Model Templates to get started quickly with ontology modeling
Commands to import and export RDF and OWL files, and to define new namespaces for ODM Packages and new labels for OWL and RDF elements

Ontologies

Ontologies define a common vocabulary for sharing information in a domain. They provide a standardized, machine-interpretable definition of basic concepts within the domain, and of relations among them. Formally defined ontologies give stakeholders the ability to:

Share common understanding of the structure of information among themselves or among software agents
Reuse domain knowledge
Explicitly codify domain assumptions
Separate domain knowledge from operational knowledge
Analyze domain knowledge effectively

The OMG ODM

The Ontology Definition Metamodel has been formalized by the OMG as a standard.

It defines an important set of enabling capabilities for Model Driven Architecture (MDA) for a formalized representation of business semantics and taxonomies, and knowledge representation based on those formalizations. It defines extensions to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to provide a custom modeling notation for ontology definition. These extensions are:

The Resource Description Framework (RDF), used to represent data, properties and formal semantics of information in the web
Web Ontology Language (OWL), used to represent terms in vocabularies, and their interrelationships; OWL extends the RDF to define both the domain information and the relevant domain meaning

Disable the MDG Technology for ODM

If you prefer not to use the MDG Technology for ODM in Enterprise Architect, you can disable it (and subsequently re-enable it) using the 'MDG Technologies' dialog (select the 'Specialize > Technologies > Manage' ribbon option).

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