SWRLx: A New Formalism for Hybrid Ontology Reasoning

Although OWL (Web Ontology Language) and SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) add considerable expressiveness to the Semantic Web, they do have expressive limitations. For some reasoning problems, it is necessary to modify existing knowledge in an ontology. This kind of problem cannot be fully resolved by OWL and SWRL, as they only support monotonic inference. In this paper, the authors propose SWRLx (Extended Semantic Web Rule Language) as an extension to the SWRL rules. The set of rules obtained with SWRLx are posted to the Jess engine using rewrite meta-rules. The reason for this combination is that it allows the inference of new knowledge and storing it in the knowledge base. The authors propose a formalism for SWRLx along with its implementation through an adaptation of different object-oriented techniques. The Jess rule engine is used to transform these techniques to the Jess model. The authors include a demonstration that demonstrates the importance of this kind of reasoning. In order to verify their proposal, they use a case study inherent to interpretation of a preventive medical check-up.