OWLlink:
Accessing OWL 2 Reasoning Services

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Overview

Strong evidence suggests that OWL 2 will become an important standard for representing ontologies. According to the W3C its featured usage is to enable applications to meaningfully process information by means of reasoning. However, from the application's point of view this requires not only a language standard for ontologies but also a standard way to interact with components which supply reasoning or other services. OWLlink adds this latter piece of the ontology infrastructure by providing an extensible protocol for communication with OWL reasoning systems. The OWLlink protocol facilitates client applications to configure a reasoner, to transmit OWL 2 ontologies or fractions thereof, and to access reasoning services via a set of basic queries. Furthermore, OWLlink is flexible in that it allows to add any desired functionality by defining a corresponding extension.

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Document Index

OWLlink core

Structural Specification

HTTP/XML Binding

HTTP/Functional Binding

HTTP/S-Expression Binding

Extensions

Retraction

Structural Specification

HTTP/XML Binding

HTTP/Functional Binding

HTTP/S-Expression Binding

Told

Structural Specification (alignment to OWL 2 pending)

HTTP/XML Binding (alignment to OWL 2 pending)

HTTP/Functional Binding (alignment to OWL 2 pending)

HTTP/S-Expression Binding (alignment to OWL 2 pending)

Extensions Under Consideration

Ontology Based Data Access

Query Interface

Concrete Domain Interface

Explanation

XML Schemas

owllink.xsd | told, told-def | retraction, retraction-def | told-retraction-xml

Examples

OWLlink core

• XML Syntax
  • Introspecting reasoner capabilities: GetDescription-request.xml | GetDescription-response.xml
  • Creating a KB: CreateKB-request.xml | CreateKB-response.xml
  • Retrieving settings: GetSettings-request.xml | GetSettings-response.xml
  • Changing a setting: Set-request.xml | Set-response.xml
  • Declaring prefixes: Prefix-request.xml | Prefix-response.xml
  • Loading ontologies: LoadOntologies-request.xml | LoadOntologies-response.xml
  • Pooling requests: PoolingRequests-request.xml | PoolingRequests-response.xml
  • Retrieving the taxonomy: Taxonomy-request.xml | Taxonomy-response.xml
• Functional Syntax
  • Introspecting reasoner capabilities: GetDescription-request.funct | GetDescription-response.funct
  • Creating a KB: CreateKB-request.funct | CreateKB-response.funct
  • Retrieving settings: GetSettings-request.funct | GetSettings-response.funct
  • Changing a setting: Set-request.funct | Set-response.funct
  • Declaring prefixes: Prefix-request.funct | Prefix-response.funct
  • Loading ontologies: LoadOntologies-request.funct | LoadOntologies-response.funct
  • Pooling requests: PoolingRequests-request.funct | PoolingRequests-response.funct
  • Retrieving the taxonomy: Taxonomy-request.funct | Taxonomy-response.funct
• S-Expression Syntax
  • Introspecting reasoner capabilities: GetDescription-request.sexpr | GetDescription-response.sexpr
  • Creating a KB: CreateKB-request.sexpr | CreateKB-response.sexpr
  • Retrieving settings: GetSettings-request.sexpr | GetSettings-response.xml
  • Changing a setting: Set-request.xml | Set-response.xml
  • Declaring prefixes: Prefix-request.sexpr | Prefix-response.xml
  • Loading ontologies: LoadOntologies-request.sexpr | LoadOntologies-response.sexpr
  • Pooling requests: PoolingRequests-request.sexpr | PoolingRequests-response.sexpr
  • Retrieving the taxonomy: Taxonomy-request.sexpr | Taxonomy-response.sexpr

OWLlink Extension

• XML Syntax
  • Retracting axioms: Retraction-request.xml | Retraction-response.xml
• Functional Syntax
  • Retracting axioms: Retraction-request.funct | Retraction-response.funct
• S-Expression Syntax
  • Retracting axioms: Retraction-request.sexpr | Retraction-response.sexpr

Implementations

RacerPro Reasoner

Prolog OWL 2 API Thea

Java OWLlink API (client/server OWLAPI connector)

Reasoning Broker Framework HERAKLES (under preparation)

Demonstrators

WebAnt - OWLlink on Rails (WebAnt.tar.gz)