During my UML modeling days, this question always stuck me with no answer. When you define a class, let me take an example as  male, you inherit a super class called human. All human attributes will be made available to male class. Then you define sub class like infant, child, teen, middle aged, aged etc.. inheritance takes the attributes from its super class. When you instantiate an object like middle aged male and let the name of the object be “Joe the plumber“, the object, Joe the plumber will have all the attributes defined in all of his class and his super classes. For generalization of the attributes of an object, UML has been doing an exemplary job. However, Joe the plumber is not same as all middle aged male. He has some unique attributes that most of plumber nor middle aged male does not have it. How to capture the unique attributes in the model. UML models completely failed to capture the attribute for an unique case or object.

We have seen marketing ads and commericals in TV that personalization is key for this and next generation marketing and sales. Each individual customers are targeted for promoting a product or service. Three to four years ago, I initiated my search to seek what industry is doing to address personalization design and that is when I ended with OWL, Protege.

Protege is an ontology tool. Ontology is few thousand  years old concept. I think it started from Ancient Greeks. Ontology is a presentation of knowledge. Immediately I became the registered member of Protege and have been using it (Frequency -> 1 hour a month, an average) for last 3-4 years. It is a very good tool to present information asset in the organization. It is easy to use once you spend significant amount of time to understand the concept and usage. I believe it will take some time to be ready for commercial use with idiot proof user interface.

Lately, I came to know that there is an open source enterprise architect plugin developed for Protege. It is called EssentialProject. It is a good enterprise architecture ontology editor. You can download it from enterprise architecture.org site.