SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) and Protege

SWRL is a Semantic Web Rule Language Combining OWL and RuleML - http://www.w3.org/Submission/2004/SUBM-SWRL-20040521/.

So far in creating ontologies for modelling for my thesis, if-then-else structures were edited using simplified english language. Elenius et al. explain that Protege now supports SWRL. This makes it possible to use SWRL expressions within Protege. So if-then-else and other control structures could be specified using SWRL. Protege provides an expression builder for this purpose. This also opens up the possibility of translating between an english representation of such structures and an SWRL structure or vice versa, so would be useful future research.

Protege support for SWRL is through the SWRLTab, and has been available since 2004 - http://protege.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SWRLTab.

This paper by Elenius et al. is available online - The OWL-S Editor - A Development Tool for Semantic Web Services - http://owlseditor.semwebcentral.org/documents/paper.pdf - Daniel Elenius, Grit Denker, David Martin, Fred Gilham, John Khouri, Shahin Sadaati, and Rukman Senanayake - SRI International, Menlo Park, California, USA.

This is the relevant paragraph - Refering to their own research - "One aspect of OWL-S services not covered in this paper is the editing of preconditions and effects of processes, and conditions associated with control constructs such as If-Then-Else. In OWL-S, these are normally described in the SWRL language. Currently, we simply provide a text box where users can enter these SWRL expressions. However, we plan to provide more user-friendly editing capabilities. Protege has recently" ... (2004)... "been enhanced with native support for SWRL, including a SWRL expression-builder, which will serve as the basis of this work."

One possible application of this would be using OWL-S, and UML type diagrams to produce interoperable process models diagrammatically.

More information on OWL is at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm#OWL.

More information on SWRL is at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm#SWRLRuleML

The Protege homepage is - http://protege.stanford.edu/.