Reasoning Support for Semantic Web Ontology Family Languages Using Alloy

Semantic Web (SW), commonly regarded as the next generation of the Web, is an emerging vision of the new Web from the Knowledge Representation and the Web communities. To realize this vision, a series of techniques has been proposed. Semantic Web Ontology Language (OWL) and its extension Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) and Semantic Web Logic Language (SWRL-FOL) are some of the most important outputs from the SW activities. However the existing reasoning and consistency checking tools for those languages are primitive. This paper proposes using the existing formal modeling tool, in particular Alloy, to provide an automatic reasoning service for the Semantic Web ontology family languages (OWL/SWRL/SWRL-FOL).