In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the adoption of ontologies and ontological reasoning to automatically recognize complex context data such as human activities. In particular, the Web Ontology Language (OWL) emerged as the language of choice, being a standard for the Semantic Web, and supported by a number of tools for knowledge engineering and reasoning. However, the limita...

The popularity of OWL for knowledge representation in the Semantic Web applications makes it an attractive platform. Although OWL supports some form of object-oriented features for knowledge structuring and maintenance, it is significantly weak in capturing most essential object-oriented features such as single and multiple inheritance, default class values, methods, overriding and encapsulatio...

In this paper we present a technique for recognising location names in non-structured texts. Our approach is based on grammar rules devised for the Italian language and semantic web tools such as geographic linked datasets, OWL ontologies, and SWRL rules, to handle data and reason about them, even in presence of name ambiguities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt of addres...

This paper describes the OWL ontology explorer OntoXpl. It is available as a web server based on the tomcat architecture. Standard HTML browsers can be used to interact with OntoXpl. At least three potential user groups are targeted by OntoXpl’s design: (i) users with a limited background of ontologies and OWL; (ii) ontology developers that are OWL experts; (iii) users interested in understandi...

The presentation concerns a draft implementation with Protégé OWL Plugin for SWRL, based on the RDF concrete syntax of the SWRL proposal. A first prototype of a SWRL Tab Widget has been achieved. It is a bridge between Protégé OWL, Racer, and Jess, intended to help reasoning with SWRL rules combined with OWL ontologies. A small example is given including an OWL ontology representing the family ...

Re-engineering of successful pre-OWL ontologies or other formal ER or UML system models towards OWL DL compliance opens new possibilities in ontology debugging, enabled by the formal semantics and automated reasoners developed for OWL DL, such as RacerPro and others. Meanwhile the transformation of pre-OWL ontologies to OWL DL is a challenging and interesting task, which we illustrate in this p...

The Semantic Web vision is being realized to reach the full potential of the Web. Semantic data modeling is the foundation of the Semantic Web. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) and OWL Rules Language (ORL) provides basic machinery to the semantic mark-up for data. However, there is limited tool support for OWL and no tool support currently for ORL. In this paper, we propose to model OWL and ORL ...

This paper describes a new syntax that can be used to write OWL ontologies, and fragments of OWL ontologies for presentation and editing purposes. The syntax, which is known as the Manchester OWL Syntax, was developed in response to a demand from a wide range of users, who do not have a Description Logic background, for a“less logician like” syntax. The Manchester OWL Syntax is derived from the...

We describe ongoing work on a bidirectional mapping between Attempto Controlled English (ACE) and OWL DL. ACE is a well-studied controlled natural language, with a parser that converts ACE texts into Discourse Representation Structures (DRS). We show how ACE can be translated into OWL DL (by using the DRS as interlingua) and how OWL DL can be verbalized in ACE. This mapping renders ACE an inter...