Transportation data models are traditionally represented using Unified Modeling Language (UML). UML diagrams are intuitive for the understanding of transportation concepts and their relationships, and thus provide standardized ways to construct transportation data models. Many UML models have been developed for this purpose. However, UML does not consider semantics; therefore, it is difficult to share data and data models represented by UML and it is also difficult to reuse these UML diagrams. On the other hand, Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a language that describes the semantics of ontology, and is thus good for knowledge sharing and reasoning. Data represented in OWL is easier to share and to perform logical inference. Unfortunately, there is no automatic method to transform data models from UML to OWL. This paper presents a method and uses transportation data as a case study to automate the transformation process. We found that transportation data represented in OWL have many advantages in facilitating data sharing and inference. Furthermore, we also found that although many elements in UML can be transformed into OWL, some of them do not have counterparts in OWL.
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