Semantic Web Rule Language

The Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is a proposed language for the Semantic Web that can be used to express rules as well as logic, combining OWL DL or OWL Lite with a subset of the Rule Markup Language (itself a subset of Datalog).[1]

The specification was submitted in May 2004 to the W3C by the National Research Council of Canada, Network Inference (since acquired by webMethods), and Stanford University in association with the Joint US/EU ad hoc Agent Markup Language Committee. The specification was based on an earlier proposal for an OWL rules language.[2][3]

SWRL has the full power of OWL DL, but at the price of decidability and practical implementations.[4] However, decidability can be regained by restricting the form of admissible rules, typically by imposing a suitable safety condition.[5]

Rules are of the form of an implication between an antecedent (body) and a consequent (head). The intended meaning can be read as: whenever the conditions specified in the antecedent hold, then the conditions specified in the consequent must also hold.

  1. ^ "SWRL: A Semantic Web Rule Language Combining OWL and RuleML". w3.org. Retrieved 21 December 2017.
  2. ^ Ian Horrocks; Peter F. Patel-Schneider (2004). "A Proposal for an OWL Rules Language" (PDF). Proc. of the Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2004). ACM. pp. 723–731. Retrieved 22 May 2014.
  3. ^ Ian Horrocks; Peter F. Patel-Schneider; Sean Bechhofer; Dmitry Tsarkov (2005). "OWL Rules: A Proposal and Prototype Implementation" (PDF). Journal of Web Semantics. 3 (1). Elsevier: 23–40. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2005.05.003. Retrieved 22 May 2014.
  4. ^ Bijan Parsia; et al. (2005). "Cautiously Approaching SWRL" (PDF). Retrieved 29 July 2006. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ^ Boris Motik; Ulrike Sattler; Rudi Studer (2005). "Query Answering for OWL-DL with Rules" (PDF). Journal of Web Semantics. 3 (1). Elsevier: 41–60. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2005.05.001. Retrieved 22 May 2014.