Checking and reasoning about Semantic Web through alloy

Abstract

Semantic Web (SW), commonly regarded as the next generation of the Web, is an emerging vision of the new Web from the Knowledge Representation and the Web communities. The Formal Methods community can also play an important role to contribute to SW development. Reasoning and consistency checking can be useful at many stages during the design, maintenance and deployment of SW ontology. However the existing reasoning and consistency checking tools for SW are primitive. We believe that formal techniques and tools, such as Alloy, can provide automatic reasoning and consistency checking services for SW. In this paper, we firstly construct semantic models for the SW language (DAML+OIL) in Alloy, and these models form the semantic domain for interpreting DAML+OIL in Alloy. Then we develop the translation techniques and tools which can automatically map the SW ontology into the DAML+OIL semantic domain in Alloy. Furthermore, with the assistance of Alloy Analyzer (AA) we demonstrate that the consistency of the SW ontology can be checked automatically and different kinds of reasoning tasks can be supported. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.