Reasoning About Provenance with OWL and SWRL Rules

AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management

Volume

Papers from the 2008 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Science and engineering are information intensive collaborative enterprises which have their own complex and rapidly evolving processes for creating, discovering, and analyzing digital artifacts. To support multiple contexts (Virtual Organizations), infrastructure must provide general purpose mechanisms for reasoning about processes and data. This paper considers one important aspect of this problem, recording and reasoning about provenance. The Open Provenance Model (OPM) provides a case study for how to use Semantic Web technology and rules to implement semantic metadata. This paper discusses a binding of the OPM written in OWL, with rules written in SWRL. These standards are useful, but cannot implement the entire OPM. However, the use of RDF enables the development of hybrid systems that use OWL, SWRL, and other semantic software, interoperating through a shared space of RDF triples.