A Visual Environment for Developing Defeasible Rule Bases for the Semantic Web

N. Bassiliades, E. Kontopoulos, G. Antoniou, “A Visual Environment for Developing Defeasible Rule Bases for the Semantic Web”, Proc. International Conference on Rules and Rule Markup Languages for the Semantic Web (RuleML-2005), A. Adi, S. Stoutenburg, S. Tabet (Ed.), Springer-Verlag, LNCS 3791, pp. 172-186, Galway, Ireland, 10-12 November, 2005.

Integrated Development Environment, Graphical Rule Editor, Defeasible Logic, Rule Markup Languages, Semantic Web Reasoning, RDF Schema.

Defeasible reasoning is a rule-based approach for efficient reasoning with incomplete and inconsistent information. Such reasoning is useful for many applications in the Semantic Web, such as policies and business rules, agent brokering and negotiation, ontology and knowledge merging, etc., mainly due to interesting features, such as conflicting rules and priorities of rules. However, the RuleML syntax of defeasible logic may appear too complex for many users. Furthermore, the interplay between various technologies and languages, such as defeasible reasoning, RuleML, and RDF impose a demand for using multiple, diverse tools for building rule-based applications for the Semantic Web. In this paper we present VDR-Device, a visual integrated development environment for developing and using defeasible logic rule bases on top of RDF ontologies. VDR-Device integrates in a user-friendly graphical shell, a visual RuleML-compliant rule editor that constrains the allowed vocabulary through analysis of the input RDF ontologies and a defeasible reasoning system that processes RDF data and RDF Schema ontologies.