A Software Framework for Translating ECA Sequences from OWL-DL into Java

Abstract

The semantic Web offers new opportunities to integrate desktop applications seamlessly with one another, but most software applications currently still rely on proprietary RDBMS systems for data storage, and application logic is typically expressed only through general-purpose programming languages without being formally defined. In this article we propose an alternative approach to designing simple applications, using an OWL-DL ontology to define ECA rules for a domain and then use a novel software framework to transform these into a functional Java API that can execute these rules according to the ontology specification. We use the simple case of a turn based word-game to illustrate the framework in action. The project methodology and framework design are discussed and suggestions for further work are proposed.