SREd: A Semantic Web Rule Editor

A key factor in the further progress of the Semantic Web is the development and wide-spread usage of ruleand logic-based applications. However, there is an evident lack of software tools that can assist end-users in developing such applications. Consequently, users usually resort to more generic tools that offer support at a syntactic level, but prove inadequate in semantically supporting the user. This paper presents SREd, a Semantic Web rule editor that introduces a supplementary layer of semantic assistance during rule base development. The tool offers semantic assistance via: (i) The Semantic Tag Mapping window that provides a meta-modeling facility for generating schemas over various rule language versions and, (ii) the Namespace Dialog window, for loading ontologies that serve as the underlying vocabulary for expressing rule atoms. SREd assists in developing RuleML rule bases, but is equally suitable for any other XML-based syntax for representing rule sets.