CLIPS–OWL: A framework for providing object-oriented extensional ontology queries in a production rule engine

In this paper, we define a framework, namely CLIPS–OWL, for enabling the CLIPS production rule engine to represent the extensional results of DL reasoning on OWL ontologies in the form of Object-Oriented (OO) models. The purpose of this transformation is to allow CLIPS to use these OO models as static query models that are able to answer extensional ontology queries directly by the RETE reasoning engine during the development of custom CLIPS production rule programs, without interfacing at runtime the external DL reasoner. In that way, any CLIPS-based application may enhance its functionality by incorporating ontological knowledge without modifying the architecture of the CLIPS rule engine. CLIPS–OWL has been implemented using the Pellet DL reasoner and the CLIPS Object-Oriented Language (COOL).