SWRL Editor: Uma ferramenta Web para visualização e edição de regras SWRL

• João Paulo Orlando USP
• Adriano Rívolli USP
• Kleberson J. Serique USP
• Dilvan A. Moreira USP

Resumo

The Semantic Web is a way to associate explicit meaning to the content of web documents to allow them to be processed directly by machines. To allow this processing, computers need to have access to structured information collections and rule sets to reason about these content. The Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) allows the combination of rules and ontology terms, defined using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), to increase the expressiveness of both. However, as rule sets grow, they become difficult to understand and error prone, especially when used and maintained by more than one person. If SWRL is to become a true web standard, it has to be able to handle big rule sets. To find answers to this problem, we first surveyed business rule systems and found the key features and interfaces they used and then, based on our finds, we proposed techniques and tools that use new visual representations to edit rules in a web application. They allow error detection, rule similarity analysis, rule clustering visualization and atom reuse between rules. These tools are implemented in the SWRL Editor, an open source plug-in for Web-Protégé (a web-based ontology editor) that leverages WebProtégé’s collaborative tools to allow groups of users to not only view and edit rules but also comment and discuss about them. We evaluated our solution comparing it to the only three SWRL editor implementations available in the literature and showed that it implements more of the key features present in traditional rule edition systems.