Re: WOWG: Need to know about your implementations -- ASAP

On Tue, 6 May 2003, Jim Hendler wrote:

>
> All-
>   For my WWW talk, and also in preparing the CR/PR materials, I need
> to generate as complete a list of OWL tools and implementations as I
> can.
>   Please send me (you're welcome to cc the list) the name and a brief
> description of any tools or systems you have built that either
> process or use OWL.  This includes both specific tools (like Sean and
> Rafael's validator) and end-to-end OWL demos (like the owl.mindswap
> portal).
>   The key criteria is that the tools must use OWL (not DAML, OIL, SHOE
> or other "similar to OWL") and I need to eventually understand how
> they use OWL features above and beyond standard RDF.
>   I'm also interested in "real world" OWL ontologies - preferably
> large ones that really use OWL (as opposed to just RDFS with
> owl:class)

Jim,

The current state of our OWL implementations is as follows:

Validator/Parser
----------------

We (Raphael Volz and I) have developed an API for interacting with OWL
ontologies. This closely follows the abstract syntax definition rather
than the underlying RDF presentations. It's biased towards OWL DL,
although it will represent structures in Full.


The species validator is built on top of these data structures and an
OWL-RDF parser. As of yesterday (6/5/03), the validator was able to parse
and validate the approved OWL tests. There are still some areas where the
API and parser need further work, in particular relating to datatype
handling and structure sharing (which is not checked for).

The validator will also render the ontologies in abstract syntax form,
which can be useful for spotting errors in the underlying RDF.

Documentation about the API and link to the species validator is available
at [1].

Next step with this work will be to provide reasoning support underneath
the API. This will be via the DIG DL reasoning protocol [2], which will
allow us to make use of FaCT, RACER and Cerebra as reasoning engines.

Editor
------

OilEd [3] has so far *not* been updated to fully support OWL. However,
much of the existing GUI functionality translates to the editing of OWL
ontologies, and export of OWL *is* possible, in both OWL-RDF and XML
Schema presentation form. DAML+OIL is still the primary representation
format though, and no OWL parsing is currently available. Our next step is
to reengineer OilEd on top of the API described above, but this is a
non-trivial task, likely to take a number of weeks.

Reasoners
---------

FaCT's concept language can support reasoning over OWL DL apart from
nominals (one-of). FaCT will not reason over ground facts. Datatype
support is minimal. RACER has a similar concept language and will reason
over ground facts.

Cheers,

	Sean

[1] http://wonderweb.semanticweb.org/owl
[2] http://dl-web.man.ac.uk/dig
[3] http://oiled.man.ac.uk

-- 
Sean Bechhofer
seanb@cs.man.ac.uk
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~seanb

Received on Wednesday, 7 May 2003 11:29:33 UTC