Rule Definition for Managing Ontology Development

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to ontology development through the application of declarative logic programming. Our method employs rules for the purpose of prototyping new ontology versions by decoupling the process of concept definition from the application of descriptive logics (DL) and advanced class representations. By generating new ontology versions on-the-fly we can test updates to the ontology design. This employment of rules expands on current efforts of translation and merging of ontologies. By employing this technique, we can support a pragmatic approach to the management and integration of instance data thus realizing a rapid-prototyping approach to the testing of potential updates to ontologies. Examples of this technique are presented utilizing a subset of the OWL-DL specification through the implementation of the Jena API. Advantages include the rapid testing of updated ontology representations (including the efficient remapping of instance data) and an efficient means of Ontology querying. Eventual benefits include Ontology versioning support and tool development to support the automatic engineering of instance data.