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same capabilities as the best editors available to
other communities.
But we went a step further and implemented this
tool as a Web-Protégé plugin (using GWT/AJAX
technology) to create a desktop like tool running on
the web, so we could add to it: zero footprint
installation, automatic updates, easy cooperation
among user groups, operating system independency,
and other well known advantages of web
applications.
The SWRL Editor uses three approaches for
visualizing rules:
1. The SWRL Text Highlight.
2. The Hierarchical View.
3. Paraphrase Visualization.
For rule composition we created two editing tools:
1. Text Editor with Syntax Highlight
2. Hierarchical SWRL Editor
Both editors have error detection, warnings,
search (for similar rules), self-completion and
hierarchical navigation of terms in the ontology.
Our main contribution is to show, using the
SWRL Editor, that it is possible to make a tool for
SWRL rule edition that have the equivalent key
features and interfaces of more traditional rule based
desktop tools (developed mainly for business users)
as a “desktop like” web application. That would not
be possible a year ago; it is only possible now due to
new internet technologies, such as HTML 5. Such a
tool is far more advanced than the current state-of-
the-art for SWRL edition.
We also show that it is possible to add
collaboration to this tool by leveraging the fact that
it runs distributed over the web, it keeps information
about rule versioning and uses Web-Protégé tools
for cooperation. No other tools described in the
literature have such feature but that is important, as
big rule sets are likely to be developed by groups of
distributed users.
As future work, we intend to develop tools to
target redundancy errors, highlight relevant rules
(given some criteria) and ways to establish
connections among rules (so if you modify one the
others in the set are highlighted).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been a collaborative project between
the Intermídia Lab – ICMC – University of São
Paulo and the Stanford Center for Biomedical
Informatics Research (BMIR) – Stanford University.
This project has been funded by the National
Institutes of Health, under grant R01MH87756. It
has also been funded by grants from the National
Council for Scientific and Technological
Development - CNPq, a Brazilian research agency.
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