Translating Attempto DRS into OWL and SWRL

Introduction

Translating an Attempto DRS into Web Ontology Language (OWL 2), or if this fails then to Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). Various serializations are provided by:

• owlfss: Prolog term based on OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax, e.g. OWL lists and sets are denoted by Prolog lists
• owlxml: OWL 2 Web Ontology Language XML Serialization
• owlfsspp: OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax, useful for pretty-printing, but also understood by e.g. the Manchester OWL API

For SWRL rules we use the functional and XML-based syntaxes that are described in http://www.webont.org/owled/2009/papers/owled2009_submission_16.pdf.

Documentation

For the documentation see:

Kaarel Kaljurand. Attempto Controlled English as a Semantic Web Language. PhD thesis, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Tartu, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10062/4876 (Printable version: http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/pubs/papers/phd_kaljurand.pdf)

Note that this thesis uses the label "OWL 1.1" to discuss OWL 2. This is because OWL 1.1 used to be the name of OWL 2 until April 2008.

Also, see the PlDoc documentation inside the translator files.

Some examples of sentences that the OWL/SWRL translator supports are available at http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/docs/writing_owl_in_ace.html.

Usage

Processing an ACE sentence `Every man likes Mary.` using the APE commandline:

ape.exe \
-uri "http://www.example.com/default" \
-noclex \
-ulextext "pn_sg('Mary', iri('http://www.example.com/names#Mary'), fem). noun_sg(man, man, masc). tv_finsg(likes, like)." \
-text "Every man likes Mary." \
-solo owlfsspp

results in:

Prefix(:=<http://www.example.com/default#>)
Ontology(<http://www.example.com/default>
        SubClassOf(
                :man
                ObjectSomeValuesFrom(
                        :like
                        ObjectOneOf(
                                <http://www.example.com/names#Mary>
                        )
                )
        )
)

Note that by using the iri-term in the lexicon one can assign the complete IRI to the surface word. Otherwise, the default namespace is assumed.