EXTENDING WEB-PROTÉGÉ
TO SUPPORT REASONING
ALOK D
SAGAR T
WEB PROTEGE
• Lightweight, web-based ontology editor.
• Open source, well documented, thus extending it
would be easy
• Built with a goal of supporting the process of
collaborative ontology development in a web
environment.
MOTIVATION: WHAT IT LACKS
• Some cross Navigation, adding equivalence
• Reasoning !!
• Ontology Versioning*
• Reasoning an ontology in Web Protégé requires
•
•
•
•
Exporting to a local file
Reasoning locally
Making required changes
Uploading the extended version
APPROACHES
• Restricting Write Access:
• Lock the existing ontology when reasoning is been
performed.
• When ontology is been reasoned, no other user can be
allowed to edit it i.e. No multiuser write access.
• Reasoning Current Snapshot:
• Reason the snapshot of the ontology currently available.
• However, current user might lose out on updates someone
else is making to the same ontology simultaneously.
• Tradeoff
TABS
PORTLETS
Configuration
File
Loosely Coupled System Architecture
Java API
Pellet
REST-ful API
Pellet
Manager
Request:
method=InfH&path=xxx
Request:
OntoPath
and Method
Response
Call Rest
Web service
for Reasoning
Web
Protege
Reasoning
Snapshot
Controller
Save Inferred
Hierarchy &
Snapshot
Local
Repository
Authentication
Module
METHODOLOGY
• Google Web Toolkit:
• Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a development toolkit for building
and optimizing complex browser-based applications.
• The GWT SDK provides a set of core Java APIs and Widgets. These
allow you to write AJAX applications in Java and then compile the
source to highly optimized JavaScript that runs across all browsers
• Create REST API and invoke Pellet.
• Local Storage for inferred hierarchy and ontology
snapshots.
• GWT User Interface.
DEMO
FUTURE WORK
• Incremental reasoning :ability of the reasoner to
process updates (additions or removals) applied to
an ontology without having to perform all the
reasoning steps from scratch.
• Pellet supports two different incremental reasoning
techniques: incremental consistency checking and
incremental classification.
• However, lack of support for OWL API forced us to
confine the approach to reasoning.
RELATED WORK & EVALUATION
• As far as Online Reasoning is concerned, no known
system is available.
• The comparison between Standard Reasoning Vs
Incremental Reasoning Will have to wait till support
for OWL-API is provided.
• So the only other evaluation aspect would be the
with the manual approach used, that of exporting
the Ontology.
CONCLUSION
• Reasoning Capability to Web Protégé added as portlets
• To invoke Pellet Reasoner (As a REST WS) that offers
• Inferred Hierarchy
• Consistency Checking
• Save and Retrieve
• Snapshots of Ontology
• Inferred Hierarchy
• The plan would be
• Testing with more Ontologies
• Little more work on the UI part
• Send it over to Web Protégé guys and hopefully it gets
incorporated at some point 
THANK YOU !