Towards an Object-Oriented Reasoning System for OWL

In this paper we present O-DEVICE, a deductive object-oriented knowledge base system for reasoning over OWL documents. O-DEVICE imports OWL documents into the CLIPS production rule system by transforming OWL ontologies into an object-oriented schema of the CLIPS Object-Oriented Language (COOL) and instances of OWL classes into COOL objects. The purpose of this transformation is to be able to use a deductive object-oriented rule language for reasoning about OWL data. The O-DEVICE data model for OWL ontologies maps classes to classes, resources to objects, property types to class slot (or attribute) definitions and encapsulates resource properties inside resource objects, as traditional OO attributes (or slots). In this way, when accessing properties of a single resource, few joins are required. O-DEVICE is an extension of a previous system, called R-DEVICE, which effectively maps RDF Schema and data into COOL objects and then reasons over RDF data using a deductive object-oriented rule language.