An Introduction to the Semantic Web Rule Language    (B4J)

This page outlines a half day tutorial on SWRL that will be presented at the 2010 Extended Semantic Web Conference in Heraklion, Greece. The presenter will be Martin O'Connor from the Stanford Center of Biomedical Informatics Research.    (B5H)

Abstract    (B4K)

This tutorial will give an introduction to SWRL, an expressive OWL-based rule language that can be used to increase the amount of knowledge encoded in OWL ontologies. The tutorial will cover the basic principles of the language and will show how it nicely complements OWL. The tutorial will also give a basic introduction to SQWRL, a SWRL-based OWL query language. There will be an interactive session where participants can experiment with the development and execution of SWRL rules.    (B58)

The target audience is any conference attendee who wishes to become familiar with SWRL. A basic, though not necessarily in-depth, familiarity with OWL is assumed. No software development experience or understanding of description logics is required.    (B5C)

By the end of the tutorial participants should have a very good overview of the SWRL language and understand how its increase in expressivity can be used to complement the expressivity provided by OWL.    (B4M)

Tutorial Description    (B4N)

The first two thirds of the tutorial will be delivered as a lecture and will give a description of SWRL’s features. It will describe how SWRL shares OWL's DL-based semantics and can be considered as a formal extension to OWL. The core language constructs will then be covered.    (B4O)

The last third of the tutorial will be an interactive session that will provide participants with the ability to encode and execute rules. The session will use the SWRLTab, a plugin to the popular open source Protégé-OWL ontology development environment.    (B4P)

Tutorial Outline    (B4R)

Part I: Introduction to SWRL    (B4S)

Part II: Interactive Session - Writing and executing rules using the SWRLTab    (B4Y)

References    (B6A)

Software Requirements    (B50)

The interactive session will use Protégé version 3.4.3, which can be downloaded from the Protégé Web site. Please download the "full" version of Protégé.    (B51)

We also prefer that you check the "Include VM in download" option before launching the install process to ensure that a Java Virtual Machine is installed. Alternatively, if you already have a 1.5 version of the JVM installed on your laptop, you may point Protégé to your JVM on the "Choose Java VM" screen during the install process (Protégé 3.4.3 requires JDK 1.5).    (B52)

Mac Users: Please be aware that you must have Mac OS X 10.4 or higher to use Protégé 3.4.3.    (B53)

Jess is a Java-based rule engine and scripting environment that the SWRLTab depends on. It must be downloaded separately. For the purposes of this tutorial, we recommend that you simply download the trial version from the Jess Web site. After you have downloaded and unzipped the Jess ZIP file to a location of your choice, click on the lib directory to locate the jess.jar file. Copy the jess.jar file and paste it into the following subdirectory of your Protégé installation:    (B55)

<your-protege-install-dir>/plugins/edu.stanford.smi.protegex.owl    (B56)

Presenter    (B59)

Martin O'Connor is a research programmer at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. His primary research interest centers around rules, querying, and data integration on the Semantic Web. He is the developer of the SWRLTab and of SQWRL. Further information can be found here.    (B5B)