Abstract
Current tools and techniques for ontology development are based on the traditions of AI knowledge representation research. This research has led to popular formalisms such as KIF and KL-ONE style languages. However, these representations are little known outside AI research laboratories. In contrast, commercial interest has resulted in ideas from the object-oriented programming community maturing into industry standards and powerful tools for object-oriented analysis, design and implementation. These standards and tools have a wide and rapidly growing user community. This paper examines the potential for object-oriented standards to be used for ontology modelling, and in particular presents an ontology representation language based on a subset of the Unified Modeling Language together with its associated Object Constraint Language.