OWLOOP: A Modular API to Describe OWL Axioms in OOP Objects Hierarchies
This addresses a specific integration challenge for developers working with OWL ontologies in OOP-based software, but it is incremental as it builds upon existing OWL-API.
The paper tackles the problem of interfacing OWL ontologies with object-oriented programming (OOP) architectures, which often leads to boilerplate code and modularity issues, by introducing OWLOOP, a modular API that extends the OWL-API to provide a general-purpose interface between OWL axioms and OOP objects hierarchies.
OWLOOP is an Application Programming Interface (API) for using the Ontology Web Language (OWL) by the means of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). It is common to design software architectures using the OOP paradigm for increasing their modularity. If the components of an architecture also exploit OWL ontologies for knowledge representation and reasoning, they would require to be interfaced with OWL axioms. Since OWL does not adhere to the OOP paradigm, such an interface often leads to boilerplate code affecting modularity, and OWLOOP is designed to address this issue as well as the associated computational aspects. We present an extension of the OWL-API to provide a general-purpose interface between OWL axioms subject to reasoning and modular OOP objects hierarchies.