SWRL2SPIN: A tool for transforming SWRL rule bases in OWL ontologies to object-oriented SPIN rules
This addresses the issue of industrial acceptance for Semantic Web applications by converting legacy SWRL rules to the more widely accepted SPIN standard, though it is incremental as it builds on existing technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of SWRL not becoming a W3C standard by developing SWRL2SPIN, a Prolog tool that transforms SWRL rule bases in OWL ontologies into object-oriented SPIN rules, enabling the prolongation of existing SWRL-based applications.
Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) combines OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontologies with Horn Logic rules of the Rule Markup Language (RuleML) family. Being supported by ontology editors, rule engines and ontology reasoners, it has become a very popular choice for developing rule-based applications on top of ontologies. However, SWRL is probably not go-ing to become a WWW Consortium standard, prohibiting industrial acceptance. On the other hand, SPIN (SPARQL Inferencing Notation) has become a de-facto industry standard to rep-resent SPARQL rules and constraints on Semantic Web models, building on the widespread acceptance of SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language). In this paper, we ar-gue that the life of existing SWRL rule-based ontology applications can be prolonged by con-verting them to SPIN. To this end, we have developed the SWRL2SPIN tool in Prolog that transforms SWRL rules into SPIN rules, considering the object-orientation of SPIN, i.e. linking rules to the appropriate ontology classes and optimizing them, as derived by analysing the rule conditions.