N. Bassiliades, “SWRL2SPIN: Converting SWRL to SPIN”, 12th International Rule Challenge, part of 2nd International Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning (RuleML+RR 2018), Luxembourg, 18-21 Sep 2018, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 2204.
SWRL is a semantic web rule language that combines OWL ontologies with Horn Logic rules of the RuleML family of rule languages. Being supported by Protégé as well as by popular rule engines and ontology reasoners, such as Jess, Drools and Pellet, SWRL has become a very popular choice for developing rule-based applications on top of ontologies. However, being doubtful whether SWRL will become a W3C standard, it is difficult to reach out to the industrial world. On the other hand, SPIN has become a de-facto industry standard to represent SPARQL rules and constraints on Semantic Web models, building on the widespread acceptance of the SPARQL query language. In this paper, we argue that the life of existing SWRL rule-based ontology applications can be prolonged by being transformed into SPIN. To this end, we have developed a prototype tool using SWI-Prolog that takes as input an OWL ontology with a SWRL rule base and transforms SWRL rules into SPIN rules in the same ontology, taking into consideration the object-oriented scent of SPIN, i.e. linking rules to the appropriate ontology classes as derived by analyzing the rule conditions.
