Acquiring Configuration Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web Using UML

The Semantic Web will provide the conceptual infrastructure to allow new forms of business application integration. This paper outlines our approach for integrating Web-based sales systems for highly complex customizable products and services (configuration systems) making use of descriptive representation formalisms of the Semantic Web. The evolving trend towards highly specialized solution providers cooperatively offering configurable products and services to their customers requires the extension of current (standalone) configuration technology with capabilities of knowledge sharing and distributed configuration problem solving. On the one hand, a standardized representation language is needed in order to tackle the challenges imposed by heterogeneous representation formalisms of state-of-the-art configuration environments (e.g. description logic or predicate logic based configurators), on the other hand it is important to integrate the development and maintenance of configuration systems into industrial software development processes. We show how to support both goals by demonstrating the applicability of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for configuration knowledge acquisition and by providing a set of rules for transforming UML models into configuration knowledge bases specified by languages such as OIL or DAML+OIL which represent the foundation for potential future description standards for Web services.