Implementation of an OWL import in WSMO4J

 The W3C has released in 2004 the recommendation for the Semantic Web Language OWL (Web Ontology Language) [1]. OWL is a formal language for representing ontologies, i.e. conceptual models. It can be used e.g. to model the information about categories of objects and how they are interrelated. The semantics of the language is based on Description Logics, and there exists three species of OWL, namely OWL Lite, OWL DL and OWL Full, each with different features and expressiveness.

At DERI Innsbruck another Semantic Web Language with more features and expressiveness has been developed, namely the Web Service Modeling Language WSML [2]. WSML is a family of formal languages for semantically describing various aspects related to Semantic Web Services. Its semantics is based on different well-known logical formalisms like e.g. Description Logics, Logic Programming, First-order Logic. According to these different influences there exist different variants of WSML with different levels of logical expressiveness. WSML provides a conceptual model that distinguishes four top-level elements, namely ontologies, Web services, Goals and Mediators, as well as a logical expression syntax.

The aim of this thesis is the implementation of a transformation of OWL ontologies to WSML ontologies. This OWL import functionality will be embedded into the WSMO API and reference implementation WSMO4J [3]. High value will be set on the interaction with the existing OWL export functionality (i.e. transformation from WSML to OWL), as complete roundtripping (i.e. the repeated conversion back and forth from one language to another) is expected.

[1]
http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-guide/ [2]
http://www.wsmo.org/TR/d16/d16.1/v0.21/ [3]
http://wsmo4j.sourceforge.net/