Publication Date
2019
Document Type
Thesis
Committee Members
Pascal Hitzler (Advisor), Mateen M. Rizki (Committee Member), Yong Pei (Committee Member), Barry Milligan (Other)
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Abstract
One hotly debated research topic is, “What is the best approach for modeling ontologies?”. In the earlier stages of modeling ontologies, researchers have favored the usage of description logic to capture knowledge. One such choice is the Web Ontology Language (OWL) that is based on description logic. Many tools were designed around this principle and are still widely being used to model and explore ontologies. However, not all users find description logic to be intuitive, at least not without an extensive background in formal logics. Due to this, researchers have tried to explore other ways that will enable such users to model ontologies intuitively. One such approach was the exploration of rule-based paradigm. For many users rule-based approach was more natural and intuitive way of representing knowledge. Hence, Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) became an extremely popular choice among researchers and naive users. However, one major problem with SWRL is that machines cannot readily process it. Therefore, researchers at Data Semantics Laboratory (DaSe Lab) created an interactive plugin, called ROWLTab, that efficiently converts rules into OWL axioms. This plugin allows a user to create ontologies using SWRL syntax and convert it into OWL axioms. However, the tool does not support translation of rules that contains a disjunction and existential quantifiers in the consequent. In this paper we will discuss the modifications that were successfully made to the existing plugin to support the translation of right-hand existential and disjunction rules. We posit that this modification gives the user the ability to model more realistic and complex ontologies. Lastly, our evaluation shows that the tool can add 89% of the rules that contains an existential quantifier and 65% of the rules that contains a disjunction. We also discuss why we were unable to insert the remaining rules more in detail.
Page Count
67
Department or Program
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Year Degree Awarded
2019
Copyright
Copyright 2019, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may not be modified. All use must give me credit as the original author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
ORCID ID
0000-0003-1056-9113
