Automatic Mapping of OWL Ontologies into Java

We present an approach for mapping an OWL ontology into Java. The basic idea is to create a set of Java interfaces and classes from an OWL ontology such that an instance of a Java class represents an instance of a single class of the ontology with most of its properties, classrelationships and restriction-definitions maintained. We note that there exist some fundamental semantic differences between Description Logic (DL) and Object Oriented (OO) systems, primarily related to completeness and satisfiability. We present various ways in which we aim to minimize the impact of such differences, and show how to map a large part of the much richer OWL semantics into Java. Finally, we sketch the HarmonIA framework, which is used for the automatic generation of agent systems from institution specifications, and whose OWL Ontology Creation module was the basis for the tool presented in this paper.