Knowledge Authoring with ORE: Testing, Debugging and Validating Knowledge Rules in a Semantic Web Framework

Ontology rule editing, testing, debugging and validation are still handcrafted and painful tasks. Nowadays, there is a lack of tools that take these tasks into consideration in order to ease the work of the developer. This paper is devoted to explain how we have come to a new tool, ORE (Ontology Rule Editor), which significantly eases these tasks. It rests on a Semantic Web framework together with reasoning engines, which operate with semantic representations. Its design maintains a loosely coupling from the framework and from rule engines. Collaborative functionalities have been tackled in order to enable a real integration of the rule authoring across different tools and/or users. A practical validation of the approach by instantiating our tool with Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 16, no. 9 (2010), 1234-1266 submitted: 11/11/09, accepted: 4/4/10, appeared: 1/5/10 © J.UCS