The Web uses Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) as a global identification system. A URI is used to identify a resource, such as a document or an abstract thing, either by a location, such as a DNS host name and a path on that machine, or a name.

When identifying real-world objects using a URI, you can choose Hash URI or 303 URI. The differences are as follows:


  • The Concept Modeler imports and preserves the URI or IRI for every OWL class and property from an OWL ontology file as the tagged value on the corresponding UML class and property in the Concept Modeler.
  • When exporting this particular model back to OWL, the Concept Modeler will not apply the normal automatic URI/IRI generation.

  • It will preserve the URI or IRI from the original OWL ontology, so that the classes and properties can be used with their correct URIs/IRIs.

  • The export URI style option also has no effect on the preserved URI or IRI.