Reusing JessTab rules in Protégé

Protégé provides a complete ontology and knowledge base management tool. Along with JESS, JessTab provides one method of rule-based reasoning over a Protégé ontology and knowledge base. However, once JessTab rules have been created for a knowledge base, they are explicitly tied to it as they name particular classes and slots, which greatly hinders their reuse with further knowledge bases. We have developed a two-phase process and a supporting tool to support the reuse of JessTab rule sets. The first phase involves changing the class and slot references in the rule set into an abstract reference; the second phase involves automatically mapping between the abstract rules and further knowledge bases. Once mappings have been defined and applied for all the classes and slots in the abstract rules, the new rule set can then be run against the new knowledge base. We have satisfactorily tested our tool with several ontologies and associated rule sets; moreover, some of these tests have identified possible future improvements to the tool.