Petri net ontology

The paper presents the Petri net ontology that enables sharing Petri nets on the Semantic Web. Previous work on formal methods for representing Petri nets mainly defines tool-specific descriptions or formats for model interchange. However, such efforts do not provide a suitable description for using Petri nets on the Semantic Web. This paper uses the Petri net UML model as a starting point for implementing the ontology. Resulting Petri net models are represented on the Semantic Web using XML-based ontology languages, RDF and OWL. We implemented a Petri net tool, P3, which can be used as a knowledge acquisition tool based on the Petri net ontology.