by Dr. Nick Bassiliades
Associate Professor, Dept. of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
SWRL2SPIN is a prototype tool built in SWI-Prolog that takes as input an OWL ontology with a SWRL rule base and transforms SWRL rules into SPIN rules in the same ontology, taking into consideration the object-oriented scent of SPIN, i.e. linking rules to the appropriate ontology classes as derived by analyzing the rule conditions. Furthermore, it optimizes the generated SPIN rules.
SWRL is a semantic web rule language that combines OWL ontologies with Horn Logic rules of the RuleML family of rule languages, extending the set of OWL axioms to include Horn-like rules. Being supported by the Protégé ontology editor as well as by popular rule engines and ontology reasoners, such as Jess, Drools and Pellet, SWRL has become a very popular choice for developing rule-based applications on top of ontologies. However, SWRL being around for more than 10 years now, it is most probable that it will never become a W3C standard; therefore, its scope is difficult to reach out to the industrial world.
On the other hand, SPIN has become a de-facto industry standard to represent SPARQL rules and constraints on Semantic Web models, building on the widespread acceptance of the SPARQL query language for querying and processing Linked Open Data. The rationale for building the tool is to be able to prolong the life of existing SWRL rule-based ontology applications by being transformed into SPIN.
The tool can be downloaded here.
Instructions for installation and run can be found inside the distribution.