REWERSE – Annual Public Report 2007 Reasoning on the Web with Rules and Semantics

The European Network of Excellence REWERSE develops rule-based languages and applications to process , query and to automatically reason over Web data. REWERSE's technologies thus enhance today's conventional Web towards a more intelligent " Semantic Web ". REWERSE's focus on rules and reasoning on the Web enhances existing Semantic Web efforts that mainly deal with the representation of semantic information. REWERSE networks more than 100 researchers that work on three main objectives: to develop a set of inter-operable, application independent rule-languages supporting various forms of Web reasoning , to provide support tools for reasoning on the Web like rule modelling, verbalization or visualisa-tion, and to test these technologies on various Semantic Web application domains like personalisation, reasoning with time and space or with Bioinformatics data. To foster durable impact REWERSE realises Education and Training activities targeted at Universities as well as Technology Transfer and Awareness activities targeted at European industry. As a W3C member REWERSE is involved in various standardisation activities. Overview. The focus of REWERSE's research activities is the definition of rule-based languages and support tools for reasoning on the Web and the application of these technologies in different application domains. In the first year, REWERSE has defined requirements and base components for the different technologies accompanied by thorough state-of-the-art surveys and use-cases. In the second year, REWERSE has defined basic parts of the languages and has implemented first prototypes of the respective technologies. In the third year REWERSE has consolidated the language definitions and has implemented functional prototypes. In the fourth and final year REWERSE has finalized its language definitions and has improved its implementations. Many groups have released stable and well documented prototypes enhanced with user-friendly interfaces. Several groups have tested the prototypes with user studies or have realized important new applications based on collaborations with other working groups. Approaching the end of the project in February 2008 the REWERSE groups have thus brought their results into a stable and documented state suitable also for use after REWERSE. In a nutshell, in 2007 the groups have been working on the following main languages, tools and prototypes: I1 Rule Modeling and Markup. A new release of R2ML, the REWERSE Rule Markup Language; URML, a UML-based visual Rule Modelling language with the visualisation tool Strelka now with a more user-friendly Eclipse based implementation; the implementation of an inference engine for the knowledge representation language ERDF – a rule-based alternative …