Rule-based OWL Modeling with ROWLTab Protege Plugin
This addresses the problem of complex and error-prone OWL modeling for ontology engineers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing theoretical transformations.
The paper tackles the difficulty of conveying logical statements in OWL by developing ROWLTab, a Protege plugin that allows users to enter OWL axioms via rules and automatically converts them to OWL 2 DL axioms. The evaluation shows that modeling with ROWLTab is much quicker and less error-prone than the standard interface for hard tasks.
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.