2011 International Conference on Electronic & Mechanical Engineering and Information Technology

Research on expert system model based on SWRL

Ren Zhengyun
College of Computer Engineering
Jingchu university of technology
Jingmen, China
hbrzy @ 163. com
The most difference between the expert system and
traditional program system is that the expert system has the
ability to reason. Its main process is that it matches facts with
the rules to generate new facts, and the final conclusion is
gradually introduced by rules.

AbstractThe expert system model based on SWRL is

proposes in the paper, which makes full use of sharing
property of ontology. The relations between knowledge can be
effectively said by ontology represents knowledge with SWRL
rules, which is helpful for knowledge sharing and reuse.

The reasoning of expert system is based on knowledge

base, the good or bad of the knowledge representation
directly affects the reasoning results. Semantic networks, the
framework and other is hard to category relations and levels
of knowledge, it is difficult to share and reuse the
represented knowledge.

Keywords- SWRL; ontology; expert system model

I.

INTRODUCTION

The knowledge base and reasoning machine is the core

component of expert system. The expert system reasons
knowledge to obtain the solution to the problem by stored
knowledge in the knowledge base. At present, a wide
knowledge expression mode is used in the expert system,
including production rules, semantic networks, frame and
logic, etc, every method has its advantages and
disadvantages, but in reasoning system construction process,
the knowledge representation method has a great influence
on reasoning result, it will directly affect the performance of
expert system. Since most knowledge base and reasoning
machine in the expert system are used for certain system
design, it is difficult to share and reuse with other related
areas of expert system, it is more difficult to separate
reasoning and facts, which makes the knowledge base of
expert system that spends large amounts of energy can't be
used better, so it will cause the resources enormous waste.
II.

It is colorful for semantic networks representation to

describe a relationship, but the definition of relationship is
arbitrary, and it is difficult to analyze and operation, and
entities and concept is categories together, a things may also
act as two roles of a category and examples. Semantic
networks can use tree to show the stratification knowledge,
which is easier to find the relationship of each class. It is
worse for frame representation methods to describe
relationship, but it can separate categories and examples, it
can also stratification that knowledge. But framework and
semantic network knowledge representation can only say the
most basic class relations of traditional way, such as is - a,
part-of, instance etc, it is difficult to say the overlap, and set
or base (the number of attribute-constraints) such
complicated relationship. Production rules of can class
category relations, but not the concept of class, only to tell
the truth, which lacks the ability of whole knowledge, as the
represented knowledge is more complex or expressed with
complex hierarchy, the efficiency of the way is much lower.

THE EXPERT SYSTEM

An expert system is computer intelligent system which

can imitate human experts thought to solve complex
problems in a particular field. The knowledge base and
reasoning machine is typical core part of expert system (Fig.
1). The knowledge base stores facts, which provide the basis
for reasoning, the reasoning engine reason according to rules
and facts and return result to the user.
knowledge base

Thus, the traditional knowledge representation method

cannot effectively represent the relationship between
knowledge to further improve the logical reasoning ability of
the expert system, which needs to find new knowledge
representation method.

fact

Ill. SWRL INTRODUCTION

Ontology is a form of shared conceptualization
specification. By identifying concept of a phenomenon,
conceptualization involves the related concepts and gets the
abstract model of phenomenon. Formal refers to ontology
should be identified by the machine. Sharing reflects the
knowledge which ontology access can be accepted, but not
proprietary. Relational database mode (Scheam), software

user
reasoning engine

reasoning result
-

Figure 1. The basic structure of expert system

978-l-61284-088-8/ll/$26. 00 2011 IEEE

489

12-14 August, 2011

engineering model, the information model of network

management field can be regarded as ontology. The
reasoning ability of Web ontology language OWL is based
on limited first-order Logic subsets, lack of attribute
synthetic, property value shift. But SWRL is a
comprehensive language which includes ontology language
OWL subset OWL DL (description logic) and OWL Lite,
and a dollar and dual Datalog RuleML rules markup
language, SWRL added the rules defined ability the basis of
the OWL. The OWL ontology contain the set of axioms and
facts, axioms are subclass,equivalentClass etc, it can also be
expanded by rules axiom: axiom: :=rule.

Consequent(hasUncle(I-variable(a)I-variable(c))
SWRL also support rich embedded principles, such as
used for comparison of the equal swrlb: equak swrlb:
greater Than Or Equal etc, and mathematical operation
function swrlb: add, swrlb: cos, still Boolean variables, string,
date, URL, the operation principle of list, it is very useful to
create rules of the expert system model.
IV.

THE DESIGN OF EXPERT SYSTEM MODEL BASED ON

SWRL
The expert system in reasoning research has made great
achievement. Meanwhile, there are many experts system
development tools, more commonly used Clips, Jess, there
Prolog etc, these promoted greatly the development of expert
system, and to a certain extent, reduce the difficulty of the
developing expert system. Figure 2 shows the expert system
model based on SWRL, which made full use of the existing
reasoning technology and development tools, and realized
the knowledge sharing and reuse.

A rule constitutes of a precondition and a conclusion,

every premise and conclusions are made by zero multiple
principles, the principle of the rules can also use the URL
reference design way.
rule::-Implies('
{annotation} antecedent consequent')'
antecedent:: - Antecedent(' { atom}')'

The model is improved according to existing problems in

knowledge base and the reasoning system of expert system.
Knowledge is expressed by samples, rules by SWRL, when
reasoning, both will be translate into acceptable format of
current reasoning machine, then the result will be shown to
user by reasoning.

consequent::- Consequent'{atom}')'
Atom can be expressed by C(x), P(x,y), sameAs (x, y),
differentFrom (x, y) etc, including C is a description of OWL,
P is an attributes of OWL,, x and y may be variable, OWL
entity or OWL data values. A rule can be looked as if
premise met, then the conclusion also is true.

A.

Construction of knowledge base

Because expert system knowledge base can not describe
the relationship between the knowledge clearly, the source of
knowledge base will be provided by the external ontology.
Ontology knowledge representation can clear description of
the relationship between categories, and category and entity
separation. Ontology is looked as a kind of knowledge
representation method of semantic Web, the system can be
different used and effectively realized the knowledge sharing.

atom: :=description'('i-object')'
|individualvaluedPropertyID'('i-objecti-object')'
| datavaluedPropertyID'('i-obj ect i-obj ect')'
|sameAs'('i-object i-object')'
|differentFrom'('i-objecti-object')'
The condition of Atom C (x) is that x is an instance C,
The condition of atom P (x, y) is that there is attribute P
relationship between x and y, The condition of atom
sameAs(x, y) is that x and y is belong to the same object, if
the differentFrom (x, y) meet, which means x and y is a
different object. Atoms can also refer to entities (individuals),
material (data literals), entity variables (variadles) or data
may variables etc.

Because ontology contains the attributes of something by

other entities, and therefore the example of ontology when
reasoning can't be used between expert system, it need
reasoning engine to interpret ontology knowledge as form
understood by expert system. Besides reasoning engine can
inspect conflict and contradiction which existed in the
ontology, and launched the implicit relationship in Ontology

i-object: :=i-variable | individuallD

Ontology and reasoning engine have many choices.

Different ontology language has different characteristics, its
describing ability is different, the ontology language and
reasoning engine can be chose according to their own
condition.

d-onject::=d-variable | dataLiteral
i-variable::=T-variable('URLreference')'
d-variable::='D-variable('URLreference')'
A simple rule of describing kinship "if b is a father of a, c
is brother of b, then c is a uncle of a" which can be
described as below by the above grammar:

B. Construction of rule base

When the utilization of existing experts system building
tool development expert system, rule says should meet to the
system requirements of rules, these rules reason from the
facts in the knowledge base, but the current system, there is
not connections between facts and rules, and the

Implies(Antecedent(
hasFather(I-variable(a)I-variable(b))
hasBrother(I-variable(b)I-variable(c))

490

Ahaslnfected(? x,? y)AVlan(? z)

representation of rules is limit to developing system, it is

difficult to realize sharing and reuse.

AbelongToVlan(? x,? y)^haslnfected(? z,? y)

Rules can achieve cross-platform sharing and reuse by

XML, by XML standard write rules, to a certain extent, it
reduce difficulty of the experts system establishment. When
reasoning, the original reasoning system needs exactly match
to rules, and the lack of semantic understanding, so rules is
said by SWRL. SWRL is rule language based on ontology, it
takes ontology language elements as the premise and
conclusion of rules, it can effectively use the knowledge in
knowledge base and solve the semantic problem existing in
the original system.

It can be described by SWRL abstract semantic.

Implies(Antecedent(
Computer(I-variable(x))WormBlaster(I-variable(y))
haslnfected(l-variable(x)l-variable(y))
Vlan(I-variable(z))
belongToVlan(I-variable(x)I-variable(z)))
Comsequent(hasInfected(I-variable(z)I-variable(y))))

SWRL can be written by OWL or XML, so SWRL can

be edited by all the development tools supporting OWL
grammar.
C. The management information definition based on SWRL
expert system model
SWRL can integrate traditional management information
model on semantic level, which can strengthen the relations
between object and entities, such as two devices connect
with each other, the relationship attribute is symmetry, it can
be described as follows by OWL.

There are two describe methods for SWRL, one is XML,

the other is RDF. The front behave information is described
as follows by XML.
<swrlx: Ontology
xmlns: owlx="http ://www. w3. org/2003/05/owl-xml"
xmlns: swrlx=" http://www.w3.org/2003/11/swrlx"
xmlns:ruleml=" http://www.w3.Org/2003/ll/ruleml">
<ruleml: var>x</ruleml: var>

<owl:ObjectPropertyrdf:ID=MConnectedTo">

<ruleml: var>y</ruleml: var>

<rdf:typerdf:resource="&owl;SymmerricProperty"/>

<ruleml: var>z</ruleml: var>

<rdfs: domain rdf:resource="#Device7>

<ruleml:imp>

<rdfs:rangerdf:resource="#Device7>

<ruleml:_body>

</owl:ObjectProperty>

<swrlx: class Atom>

Including SymmetricProperty describles the symmetry

of attribute ConnectedTo, namely if P(y,x) is established,
then P(x,y) is founded. OWL supports similar rich grammar
as TransitiveProperty etc.

<owlx:Class owlx:name="Computer"/>

But OWL ontology language is insufficient in describing

the ability of rules information. While the Behavior
information in network management field is very important,
the traditional Behavior information is usually described by
natural language, such as the Behavior of GDMO standard,
and in network management system, the semantic
information implementations are usually defined by simple
data types, such as enumeration data type is used to describe
the severity of a network fault by traditional way, such as
WARNING is 0, CRITICAL is 1. FATAL is 2, and the
concrete expression meaning is unclear, only by
programmers subjectively judge. In order to make the
machine can understand the behavioral implications in
network management, natural language and data type is not
appropriate, and it need to use formal rules language to
describe. The severity of the impact of some event in
Network is complex and concrete. For instance some
computer of campus network in a student dormitory infects
shock (Worm Blaster), then it means the VLAN of the
machine is infected by shock, which could be described as:

<swrlx: class Atom>

<ruleml: var>x</ruleml: var>

</swrlx: classAtom>
<owlx:class Owlx:name="WormBlaster'7>
<ruleml: var>y</ruleml: var>
</swrlx: classAtom>
<swrlx: class Atom>
<owlx:Class owlx:name="Vlan"/>
<ruleml: var>z</ruleml: var>
</swrlx: individualPropertyAtom
swrlx:property="hasInfected">
<ruleml: var>x</ruleml: var>
<ruleml: var>y</ruleml: var>
</swrlx: individualPropertyAtom>
<swrlx: individualPropertyAtom
swrlx:property=MbelongToVlan">
<ruleml: var>x</ruleml: var>

Compouter(? x) AWormBlaster(? y)

491

applied in different fields. With the continuous development

of SWRL application, more and more information is
expressed by ontology, the ontology can be combined with
SWRL and rules by these information resources, which will
make the expert system obtain larger development space.

<ruleml:var>z</ruleml:var>
</swrlx:individual :PropertyAtom
swrlx:property="hasInfected">
</ruleml: var>z</ruleml: var>

Teaching research project of Hubei Province (NO.

B200767002)

</ruleml:var>y</ruleml:var>
</swrlx:individualPropertyAtom>
</ruleml:_head>

REFERENCES
[1]

</ruleml:imp>
</swrlx: Ontology>

[2]

Due to the present expert system building tools can not

directly to explain to SWRL, so it need transformed into
acceptable format by translation applicant. The translation
applicant can adopt according to the specific SWRL written
language and expert system development tools.
V.

[3]
[4]

CONCLUSION

[5]

This paper puts forward expert system model based on

SWRL, which constructs knowledge base by ontology
knowledge representation mode and realize the share and
reuse of expert system knowledge base. The model can be

492

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