AKTive Workgroup Builder: Semantic Web Instance Data Reasoning

Our interest lies in exploring the interplay between ontological and rule based reasoning with instance data when applied to Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) solving. The AKTive Workgroup Builder (AWB) is a Semantic Web application developed to help us achieve this aim. We share our experiences of developing the AWB – how the current technologies can influence the usability and design of such an application – and describe our approach to reasoning using both ontological and rule based methods. We show how these rules can be represented using the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). Constraints are then expressed against the semantic data using our Constraint Interchange Format (CIF) combined with SWRL to form a fully quantified constraint representation CIF/SWRL. Finally, the problem specific constraints and the reasoned domain knowledge are then bundled together into a CSP which the AWB attempts to solve, returning the solution (if there is one) to the user.