XSWRL, an Extended Semantic Web Rule Language and prototype implementation

Although the OWL (Web Ontology Language) and SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) add considerable expressiveness to the Semantic Web they do have expressive limitations. For some reasoning problems it is necessary to infer the existence of new individuals satisfying stated condition. This kind of problems can not be fully resolved by OWL and SWRL. We present the XSWRL (Extended Semantic Web Rule Language), an extension to SWRL, to overcome these problems. XSWRL introduces existentially quantified variables to rules. XSWRL extends SWRL in a syntactically and semantically coherent manner. We show that while the expressiveness of the Semantic Web language is improved, the undecidability and infinite chains are brought on. We define the inseparable set of atoms to separate XSWRL rules, and discuss a prototype implementation of reasoning support for XSWRL.