Knowledge authoring with ORE: testing, debugging and validating knowledge rules in a semantic web framework

Ontology rule editing, testing, debugging and validation are still handcrafted and painful tasks. Nowadays, there is a lack of tools that take these tasks into consideration in order to ease the work of the developer. This paper is devoted to explain how we have come to a new tool, ORE (Ontology Rule Editor), which significantly eases these tasks. It rests on a Semantic Web framework together with reasoning engines, which operate with semantic representations. Its design maintains a loosely coupling from the framework and from rule engines. Collaborative functionalities have been tackled in order to enable a real integration of the rule authoring across different tools and/or users. A practical validation of the approach by instantiating our tool with Jena and Pellet reasoning engines is presented here. In order to demonstrate its use, the tool is applied to the task of rule-based management in a ubiquitous computing scenario.