Using JessTab to integrate protege and jess - Intelligent Systems, IEEE [see also IEEE Expert]

operations on ontologies or modify a knowledge base in certain ways. We might want to define rules that trigger actions after matching knowledge base patterns, or run a problem-solving method and record the results in a knowledge base. Integrating development environments with other software is a critical factor for using these systems in a range of organizations and a key to widespread acceptance of such environments. Protégé1 is a popular, modular ontology development and knowledge acquisition tool. It produces output (that is, ontologies and knowledge bases) that other programs can read. Protégé assumes that the system’s performance engine runs as a separate program, perhaps on a different platform. This separation is often advantageous because the development and runtime environments are different. Nevertheless, tight integration with the performance engine is sometimes essential. Currently, we can access Protégé knowledge bases using Java and an application-programming interface, but doing so is time consuming. I built a plug-in called JessTab (www.ida.liu.se/ ~her/JessTab), which integrates Protégé with Jess, a light, fast rule engine and scripting environment. (See the “Background” sidebar on page 46 for more detailed information on Jess, Protégé, and the Protégé Axiom Language.) By creating a declarative mapping between these tools’ knowledge representation schemes, JessTab lets us build knowledge bases in Protégé that work with Jess programs and rule bases. JessTab can also propagate modifications automatically to mapped Protégé instances on Jess.