OWLET: An Object-Oriented Environment for OWL Ontology Management

In this paper, an object-oriented model and a software environment for the management of OWL ontologies is presented. The object-oriented model allows a simple and complete representation of ontologies defined by using OWL DL profile. The software environment, called OWLET, implements this object-oriented model and provides a complete set of reasoning functions together with a graphical editor for the creation and modification of ontologies. OWLET can be very useful for realizing heterogeneous and distributed semantic systems where nodes differ for their capabilities (i.e., CPU power, memory size, …); in fact, it offers a layered reasoning API that allows to deploy a system where high power nodes take advantages of all the OWLET reasoning capabilities, medium power nodes take advantages of a limited set of OWLET reasoning capabilities (e.g., reasoning about individuals) and low power nodes delegate reasoning tasks to the other nodes of the system.