OWL and Protg

Abeer Nasser Bin Jumah

Computer Science and Information System, KSU
Supervised by: Dr Ayman Ahmed Khalafallah
10 May 2013

Abstract Research paper presents the ontology web language OWL and how it is useful
especially among the huge amount of data either on the web or organizations. Therefore, OWL
gives a good meaning to the data and connect it with other related data to present an
information to the user. OWL needs a platform called Protg in order to achieve its goals,
Protg produces classes, individuals, properties and other components that enable OWL to
have appropriate use of Protg.

Introduction
Now a days the large amount of data with different formats and structures make it difficult for computers
or individuals to exchange data and the changes in the requirements faster than the web services can
fallow. Because of that there will be too much unrelated data rather than the knowledge that the data
should present to solve problems. Fortunately Semantic Web produce Web-based data to allow present a
Web searches in efficient way to the user. It allow web-based content to be expressed in human language
as well as other languages that can be read and utilized by automated systems. So Semantic Web provide
a solution to people and machines to Find and share information and knowledge in productive
manner[1][2].

Ontology:
Ontology is a description or definition of the concepts and relationships that connects related objects or
data to gather, That's mean Ontology represents information and knowledge rather than row data that does
not gives any sense[3][4]. Figure1 shows enterprise IS ontology example.

Figure1: Enterprise IS Ontology[5]

Ontology Web Language OWL

The Semantic Web utilizes Ontology Web Language (OWL) to convert data to information then to
knowledge to be efficiently used. OWL Developed by a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). There is
three types of WOL depending on its language:

OWL Full:

It gives the user more syntactic freedom of RDF that is used by Semantic Web to describe data. OWL
Full allows an ontology to augment the meaning of the predefined RDF or OWL vocabulary.

OWL DL:

OWL DL has a certain restriction on all OWL language constructs. DL refer to description logics , a
field of research that has studied the logics that form the formal foundation of OWL.

OWL Lite:

It has the lowest formal complexity and It provide tool support for supporting [6].

OWL ontology content

Classes there is super and subclasses, class may inherit other class.

Individuals it is as same as object of a class .

Properties it links individuals from each class together.

Relations between classes as inheritance, disjoints and equivalents.

Restrictions on properties to set a special type or cardinality to properties.

Characteristics of properties it might be transitive or Inverse between individuals.

Annotations to add comments.

Reasoner to make sure that all query results are correct.

Protg
Protg is a platform or toolset for developing OWL for different systems. Protg present knowledge
according to the user inputs and generate a graphical presentation to make it easier to read information
and it can handle large amount of data. Protg ontology is not limited to OWL, it develop also RDF(S)
and XML Schema as well[7][8].

OWL and Protg

Below some graphs that shows how Protg presents OWL to get some fact about Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia:
Individuals (e.g., Riyadh)
Properties
ObjectProperties (references)
DatatypeProperties (simple values)
Classes (e.g., KSA, Center)

To links to individual together:

Figure2: Object Properties

Inverse Properties represent bidirectional relationships between two individuals:

Figure3: Inverse Properties

Transitive Properties:

Figure4: Transitive Properties

Datatype Properties that Sets individuals to primitive values as integers, floats, strings, booleans and
so on:

Figure5: Datatype Properties

Classes:

Figure6: Classes

Range and Domain: (Individuals can only take values of properties that have matching domain[8])

Figure7: Range and domain

Relations between classes as inheritance, equivalents and disjoints as bellow:

Figure8: Class Disjoint

Bellow there is some conditions definition to apply it on property

allValuesFrom
someValuesFrom
hasValue
minCardinality
maxCardinality
cardinality

Bellow is the way to show relationship between classes

unionOf.
intersectionOf.
complementOf .

Protg Interface:

Figure9: Protg Classes

Figure10: Individuals

Figure11: Properties

Figure12: Characteristics of Properties

Figure13: Domain and Range

Figure14: The circle shows the annotation, 2 shows super and subclasses and 1 shows the disjoint option

Figure15: Properties View

Figure16: Classes Restrictions

Note: There is very important feature in Protg called OWLViz and it presents classes
and properties as a nodes and edges to give clear idea about the relationship between data.

Figure17: OWLViz [18]

Conclusion:
After knowing the concept of OWL and Protg it shouldnt be data overlaps or unrelated data,

OWL present efficient solution organize data and make it readable by users or computer,
that means we will save time, effort and save our data from loss.

 References:
[1] Priddy Michael, The Semantic Web, Intervise Consultants, Inc.
[2] Holger Knublauch, Ray W. Fergerson, Natalya F. Noy and Mark A. Musen,The Protege OWL
Plugin, Stanford Medical Informatics, Stanford School of Medicine.
[3] Barry Smith, Ontology and Information Systems.
[4] Smith Barry, 1993, What is Ontology, Stanford University.
[5] Rogerio Atem de Carvalho, 2011,esi, http://eis-development.blogspot.com/,Last access 8
May 2013.
[6] Deborah L. McGuinness, Frank van Harmelen,10 February 2004,w3,
http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/, Last access 8 May 2013.
[7]2013, Protege, http://protege.stanford.edu/ ,Last access 8 May 2013.
[8] Holger Knublauch, 6 July 2004 ,Editing OWL Ontologies with Protg, Stanford University.