Design and Implementation of a Semantic Web Rule Markup Language OWLRule+

Semantic Web is a great vision for the future Web architecture. Its development proceeds in layers. At present,the highest layer that has reached sufficient maturity is the ontology layer in form of OWL. However,its semantics is limited to description logic,which focuses on modeling hierarchies of classes but has weak expressive power for rules. Therefore,a richer logical language should be provided on top of them. A new markup language for semantic Web rules?-?OWLRule+ is presented. Its syntax extends OWL,and its semantics is based on CARIN,a representation language combining description logic and Horn rules. Its implementation via Jess rule engine is also described. Case study demonstrates its rule representation and inference abilities.