Tool Evaluation

[andrew kwak]

Hello!

I'm having to evaluate some tools for my professor. I was wondering if
TopBraid composer fulfills these requirements? If it does,
does the free version have the capability to do so?

1) Find tools to assist with converting UML class diagram (in XMI) to
RDF.  Also see if they have API we can call so that this conversion
can be done programmatically.  Pick a tool with an API.

2) Save the RDF to Apache Jena

3) Create SPARQL queries to find specific UML patterns (will supply
this later).  We will need to find specific relationships between
classes to detect security design patterns.

If it doesn't can anyone make any suggestions? It didn't seem like there were many options when I was looking on google. 

I tried looking at EulerGUI but it seems outdated. Thanks in advance!

-Drew

[Irene Polikoff]

Hello Drew,

TBC is a single user tool, not licensed to be called via APIs. APIs our offered by our server product, TopBraid EDG.

I am not aware of any tool that would auto-convert XMI to RDF in a semantically meaningful way. Although XMI is intended as an interchange format,  there are still variations across the UML tools that produce it. XMI produced by one UML tool may not be correctly imported by another tool. Then, there is a complex topic of RDF conversion.

What you can do with TBC is open any XML file. If you have XSD for XML, you get a more meaningful conversion. Otherwise, there is a default conversion that translates hierarchical information in XML using smxl:child property. You can read more about this at https://topbraidcomposer.org/html/XMap.htm. Or better, use Help within TBC.

Once you get a row or semi-row conversion to RDF, you can use SPARQL and/or write SPIN and SHACL transformation rules to get it into the shape you want your final RDF to be in. However, even with the row/generic conversion, what you get is RDF and you could query it with SPARQL.

With respect to your requirements 2 and 3:

You can use TBC to create Jena database and import any RDF into it.

You can use TBC to create and execute SPARQL queries. To do this, your RDF does not need to be loaded to Jena. It could stay as a file that you open in TBC. Internally, this will load it into RAM and use Jena APIs but all of this will be transparent to you.

You could try these operations by downloading a trial version of TBC.

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[Holger Knublauch]

Hi Drew,

TopBraid used to support importing UML files in older versions, but we removed that as it was barely used by anyone and we found the UML formats were not really cross-platform - too many dialects and incompatible tool interpretations. Even with XMI, there were too many variants and dialects to meaningfully make sense.

Holger