Rule-based OWL Modeling with ROWLTab Protege Plugin

TL;DR

The paper introduces ROWLTab, a Protege plugin that simplifies OWL axiom creation by converting rules into OWL 2 DL axioms, improving modeling speed and accuracy.

Contribution

It presents a novel plugin that enables rule-based OWL modeling with automatic conversion to OWL axioms, enhancing usability and reducing errors.

Findings

Modeling with ROWLTab is significantly faster than standard Protege interface.

Using ROWLTab reduces errors in complex modeling tasks.

The plugin effectively converts rules into OWL axioms when possible.

Abstract

It has been argued that it is much easier to convey logical statements using rules rather than OWL (or description logic (DL)) axioms. Based on recent theoretical developments on transformations between rules and DLs, we have developed ROWLTab, a Protege plugin that allows users to enter OWL axioms by way of rules; the plugin then automatically converts these rules into OWL 2 DL axioms if possible, and prompts the user in case such a conversion is not possible without weakening the semantics of the rule. In this paper, we present ROWLTab, together with a user evaluation of its effectiveness compared to entering axioms using the standard Protege interface. Our evaluation shows that modeling with ROWLTab is much quicker than the standard interface, while at the same time, also less prone to errors for hard modeling tasks.