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Ontolog Panel Discussion: Rules in Semantic Web Applications - Thu 26-June-2008

  • Panel Session Topic: Rules in Semantic Web Applications
  • Panelists / Title of Presentations:
    • Dr. Jos de Bruijn (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy) - "RIF: A Standard Rules Language for the Semantic Web"
    • Mr. Martin O'Connor (Stanford-BMIR) - "Knowledge Integration with SWRL"
    • Dr. Leo Obrst (MITRE) - "Semantic Web Ontologies and Rules With Efficient Runtime Reasoning Using Logic Programming"

Conference Call Details

  • Date: Thursday, June 26, 2008
  • Start Time: 10:30am PDT / 1:30pm EDT / 7:30pm CEST / 17:30 UTC
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Attendees

  • Other registered participants who may have joined us after the roll call:
    • Ravi Sharma
    • Cassandra Gluyas (Lockheed Martin)
    • Jaehyun Lee (NIST)
    • Frank Alvidrez
    • John Shockro (Raytheon)
    • Peter Bruhn Andersen (Mind Creatures, Denmark)
    • Paul Haley (Automata)
    • DavidHarris
    • Raphael Barbau (NIST)
    • Sylvere Krima (NIST)
    • DaveMcComb
    • ... to register for participation, please add your name above (plus your affiliation, if you aren't already a member of the community) above, or e-mail <peter.yim@cim3.com> so that we can reserve enough resources to support everyone's participation. ...

Agenda & Proceedings

Panel Discussion: "Rules in Semantic Web Applications"

  • This is part 2 of a two-part sequel on Rules and the Semantic Web. Dr. Chris Welty (IBM) started the sequel off with a premier presentation on the "Rules Interchange Format (RIF)" providing an overview on the work of the W3C RIF Working group and, in particular, on the RIF-BLD "Basic Logic Dialect" (ref. ConferenceCall_2008_06_12). In this session, our panelists will brief us, respectively, on RIF in relation to RDF & OWL; SWRL and its application; and, an example of ontologies and rules in a reasoning application using logic programming.
  • Session Format: this is a virtual session conducted over an augmented conference call. We will start off with briefing from the expert panel, and then open up to all participants for Q&A and discussions.
  • Agenda:
    • 1. Opening by the Session Chairs - Leo Obrst
    • 2. we'll go around with a self-introduction of participants (15~20 minutes) - All - we'll skip this if we have more than 25 participants (in which case, it will be best if members try to update their namesake pages on this wiki prior to the call so that everyone can get to know who's who more easily.)
    • 3. Panelists' Briefings (20 min. each) - JosDeBruijn, MartinOConnor & Leo Obrst
    • 5. Q & A and Open discussion by all participants (45~60 minutes) - All, via the conference call and the IM chat session.
    • 6. Summary / Conclusion / Follow-up-actions by the Session Chairs - Leo Obrst

Topic: "Rules in Semantic Web Applications"

The Panel

LeoObrst_20080626.png . . . MartinOConnor_20080626.png . . . JosDeBruijn_20080626.png

[Dr. Leo Obrst] [Mr. Martin O'Connor] [Dr. Jos de Bruijn]

Abstracts

  • RIF: A Standard Rules Language for the Semantic Web - JosDeBruijn
The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) working group is about to publish the last

call working draft of RIF BLD (Basic logic Dialect) [1], which is a Horn logic-based language for exchanging rules over the Web. In the Semantic Web context, it has been recognized that it must be possible to combine RIF rules with RDF data and RDFS and OWL ontologies, which led to the RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility specification [2]. RIF documents (i.e., rulesets) may import RDF graphs and OWL ontologies. The semantics of these imports is defined through combination of the RIF and RDF/OWL model theories. We give an overview of the design of RIF RDF and OWL compatibility, highlighting the decisions that led to the design, paying special attention to the way we dealt with the divide between the RDF and OWL DL semantics.

We then show how reasoning with combinations of RIF rules and RDF and a

subset of OWL DL can be reduced to rule reasoning.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-bld/

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-rdf-owl/

Jos de Bruijn received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in 2008 and his M.Sc. degree in Technical Informatics from the Delft, University of Technology, The Netherlands, in 2003.
Since 2007 he is employed as assistant-professor at the Faculty of Computer Science, at the Free University of Bolzano, Italy. His research interests include Semantic Web (Services) languages, Logical languages, Logic Programming and Non-Monotonic Reasoning. He is (co-)author of 30+ peer-reviewed publications, including several books and journal publications.
He has taught courses about the Semantic Web in the Master curricula of the University of Innsbruck and the Free University of Bolzano, Italy.
Jos has been actively involved in the European projects COG, ASG, SEKT, DIP, and Knowledge Web. He is a member of the ESSI WSML working group and of the W3C RIF working group.
Data integration is a central challenge of the Semantic Web. Applications built on the Semantic Web must typically deal with a variety of information formats. Ontology languages such as RDF and OWL provide a means of uniformly representing the semantic content of these formats. However, a variety of tools and techniques are required to physically transform the data in various formats to an integrated form. The transformations required range from low level structural or syntactic mappings to mappings that require extensive domain knowledge. We show how rules can provide a unifying knowledge-based approach to building some of these mapping technologies. In particular, we show how the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) can be used to tackle the complex structural and semantic transformations needed to reconcile common Web information formats. We describe a number of open-source tools we have developed to allow users to perform these mappings.
Martin O'Connor is a currently member of the Research Staff at the Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at the Stanford Medical Schopol (Stanford-BMIR). Before joining Stanford-BMIR, he worked for several years at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. At Stanford he was involved in the development of the EON system, a component-based architecture for developing decision support systems for guideline based care. I also developed the Chronus temporal query system which was used to perform temporal queries on biomedical data. He is currently involved in the development of [[BioSTORM]], a research system to evaluate intelligent systems for epidemic detection and characterization. In parallel with the [[BioSTORM]] efforts he has been investigating the use of rules and query languages on the Semantic Web. Mr. O'Connor currently developing the SWRLTab, an open source Protege-OWL-based development environment for the Semantic Web rule language SWRL.
  • Semantic Web Ontologies and Rules With Efficient Runtime Reasoning Using Logic Programming - LeoObrst
Ontologies enable explicit expression of community concepts and support Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interactions at the semantic level. Ontologies expressed in a standard language such as OWL and exposed on a network offer the potential for greater interoperability solutions since ontologies are semantically rich, computer interpretable and inherently extensible. In this talk, we describe how we applied ontologies and rules for rapid enterprise integration of heterogeneous data sources and aggregation of events for situational awareness in a pilot focused on military convoy movement in a theater operation. In particular, we describe our transformation of OWL ontologies + SWRL rules into the logic programming paradigm, and the resulting efficient runtime automated reasoning architecture that utilized those ontologies, knowledge bases, and rules in a service-oriented framework that also used Google Earth for visualization.
Leo Obrst is a principal artificial intelligence scientist in the Information Discovery and Understanding department at MITRE's Command and Control Center, where he leads the Information Semantics Group (semantics, ontological engineering, knowledge representation and management), and has been involved in projects on Semantic Web rule/ontology interaction, context-based semantic interoperability, ontology-based knowledge management, conceptual search and information retrieval, metadata and taxonomy/thesaurus construction for community knowledge sharing, intelligent agent technology, semantic support for natural language processing, and ontology-based modeling of complex decision-making. He is also currently involved in many US federal government efforts to establish Communities of Interest (COI) vocabularies/models for information sharing, including the development of universal and common core vocabularies/models which span those COIs.
Leo's PhD is in theoretical linguistics with a concentration in formal semantics from the University of Texas-Austin. He has worked over 24 years in computational linguistics, knowledge representation, and in the past 14 years in ontological engineering and more recently in Semantic Web technologies. Besides MITRE, Leo has worked for VerticalNet, Boeing, Software Development Group (a partner), Intelligent Business Systems, the Microelectronics Computer Corporation (MCC), Texas Instruments, SoftCraft, and Ohio Edison. Leo is also one of the three co-conveners of ONTOLOG, a virtual community which they co-founded in 2002.

Resources

  • Bibliography and Additional Resources:
    • From JosDeBruijn:
    • From MartinOConnor:
    • From Leo Obrst:
      • Stoutenburg, Suzette; Leo Obrst; Deborah Nichols; Paul Franklin; Ken Samuel; Michael Prausa. 2007. Ontologies and Rules for Rapid Enterprise Integration and Event Aggregation. Vocabularies, Ontologies and Rules for the Enterprise (VORTE 07), EDOC 2007, Annapolis, MD, Oct. 15-19, 2007.
      • Obrst, Leo; Dru McCandless; Suzette Stoutenburg; Karen Fox; Deborah Nichols; Mike Prausa; Rick Sward. 2007. Evolving Use of Distributed Semantics to Achieve Net-centricity. Regarding the "Intelligence" in Distributed Intelligent Systems, AAAI Fall Symposium, Arlington VA, Nov. 8-11, 2007.
      • Samuel, Ken; Leo Obrst; Suzette Stoutenberg; Karen Fox; Paul Franklin; Adrian Johnson; Ken Laskey; Deborah Nichols; Steve Lopez; and Jason Peterson. 2008. Applying Prolog to Semantic Web Ontologies & Rules: Moving Toward Description Logic Programs. The Journal of the Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), Massimo Marchiori, ed., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
      • Stoutenburg, Suzette; Leo Obrst; and Deborah Nichols. 2007. Ontologies in OWL for Rapid Enterprise Integration. OWL: Experiences and Directions Third International Workshop (OWLED 2007), 6-7 June 2007, Innsbruck, Austria.
      • Stoutenburg, Suzette; Obrst, Leo; Nichols, Deborah; Samuel, Kenneth; and Franklin, Paul. 2007. Toward a Standard Rule Language for Enterprise Application Integration, Year 2 Results, MITRE Technical Report MTR070025, February, 2007.
      • Stoutenburg, Suzette, Leo Obrst, Deborah Nichols, Ken Samuel, and Paul Franklin. 2006. Applying Semantic Rules to Achieve Dynamic Service Oriented Architectures. [[RuleML]] 2006: Rules and Rule Markup Languages for the Semantic Web, co-located with ISWC 2006, Athens, GA, November 10-11, 2006. In: Service-Oriented Computing ICSOC 2006, Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 4294, 2006, pp. 581-590. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, Also: MITRE Technical Report MTR 06B0000014, March 2006. http://www.mitre.org/work/tech_papers/tech_papers_06/06_0904/index.html

Questions, Answers & Discourse

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Questions and Discussion captured from the chat session

Peter P. Yim: Welcome to the Ontolog Panel Discussion: Rules in Semantic Web Applications - Thu 26-June-2008

  • Panel Session Topic: Rules in Semantic Web Applications
  • Session Chairs: Dr. Leo Obrst (MITRE; Ontolog)
  • Panelists / Title of Presentations:

o Dr. Jos de Bruijn (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy) - "RIF: A Standard Rules Language

for the Semantic Web"

o Mr. Martin O'Connor (Stanford-BMIR) - "Knowledge Integration with SWRL"

o Dr. Leo Obrst (MITRE) - "Semantic Web Ontologies and Rules With Efficient Runtime Reasoning

Using Logic Programming"

Tom Brunner: Where does F-Logic fit into ontology building?

Arturo Sanchez: Are these mappings and combinations automatically derived or people have to build them

on a case-by-case basis?

JosDeBruijn: Note that RIF-OWL DL combinations are essentially a superset of SWRL. The semantics of

these combinations is in the spirit of SWRL. You can use exclusively OWL classes and

properties, but you can also use other predicates.

Pat Cassidy: Does SWRL/SQWRL support OWL-full?

JosDeBruijn: Pat Cassidy: No; SWRL is based on the OWL DL semantic world, which is incompatible with

the RDF semantic world (OWL full is based on the latter)

JosDeBruijn: Pointer for Martin: Parsia & Co. created a SPARQL-like language for querying OWL DL;

I expect this can be readily adapted to SWRL: http://clarkparsia.com/files/pdf/sparqldl.pdf

MartinOConnor: SWRL/SQWRL does not directly support OWL-Full. However, there is a TBox built-in library

that can be used (http://protege.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SWRLTBoxBuiltIns) that provided

effective support, though it would not be safe to use these built-ins to reach conclusions;

we use them a lot in queries.

Xenia Fiorentini: when will the SWRL Tab be available for Protege 4?

Xenia Fiorentini: is there a tool/editor you would suggest me to use to work with both OWL 1.1 and SWRL?

MartinOConnor: Protege 4 supports OWL 1.1 and has a very limited SWRL editor. Pellet can be used

in Protege 4 to execute the rules. Pellet now has pretty robust SWRL support and

I think understands OWL 1.1. I hope to port all SWRLTab functionality to Protege 4

by the end of the year.

Xenia Fiorentini: thank you Martin

Ken Baclawski: Jos de Bruijn: I have a question related to Arturo's. How general is this notion of profile?

Will there be a small set of standard profiles, or could one define other profiles?

JosDeBruijn: Ken: there is a set of defined profiles, but this set

is extensible: http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/SWC#Specific_Profiles

... (there is a comment about new profiles just above the sections)

Ken Baclawski: Martin O'Connor: I did some work on integrating highly dynamic database queries with

rules in wireless communication. We used prolog as the rule engine and the "database"

was a running program which was queried using programming language reflection. See

D. Brady, K. Baclawski, M. Kokar and J. Wang. Achieving Self-Awareness of SDR Nodes through

Ontology-Based Reasoning and Reflection.

... In Proceedings from the Software Defined Radio Technical Conference - SDR'04 (2004).

MartinOConnor: Ken - thanks. I will take a look at that paper.

JosDeBruijn: RDFS cannot be translated to SQL; ground entailment in RDFS is Ptime-hard, whereas

with SQL you can only compute LogSpace queries

  • ... More Questions
    • For those who have further questions or remarks on the topic (or ones tha are left unanswered), please email the individual panelists directly, or, better still, post them to the [ontolog-forum] so that everyone in the community can benefit from the discourse.
  • Session ended 2008.06.26 12:35 pm PDT

Audio Recording of this Session

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  • Conference Date and Time: 26-Jun-2008 10:49am~12:35pm PDT
  • Duration of Recording: 1 Hour 44 Minutes
  • Recording File Size: 11.9 MB (in mp3 format)
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