Literate ontologies for fun and profit

admin — 2025-12-05T18:50+00:00

Logic.Tools is a platform that helps companies develop applications based on semantic web technologies. Today, Logic.Tools-powered applications are deployed and running in two domains: an insurance company in France and train operators in Belgium and Luxembourg. In these applications, a combination of OWL, SWRL and RDF is used to describe business concepts, behavior and data. Logic.Tool's high performance reasoners render the business description executable, which is then used to test, explain and deploy running applications.

One of the strengths of the approach taken by Logic.Tools is that business concerns are modeled and executed independently from technical concerns. This separation, where the business concerns are not obscured by technical worries, opens the door to non- technical stakeholders such as domain experts to read, understand, vet and ultimately change the core of an application.

When we started Logic.Tools, we came to the realization that ontology/semantic web authoring tools were lacking. To our opinion, no existing OWL/RDF/SWRL tool: treats rules as a first-class entity, provides an intuitive interface to non-programmers, includes a high-performance reasoner, among a long list of desiderata. We set then on a path, that would ultimately result in the subject of our demo: The Logic.Tools Studio.

The Logic.Tools Studio is an opinionated development system for OWL+SWRL ontologies. The central innovation in the Logic.Tools Studio is its support for what we call Literate Ontologies; that is Knuth's Literate Programming (Knuth, 1992) applied to the definition of ontologies.

In this demonstration, through a non-trivial example application we will explore the Logic.Tools Studio live, showing:

How literate ontologies are used to encapsulate the business meaning of an application;
the integrated support of different RDF syntaxes (RDF/XML, turtle, JSON-LD), and our turtle-inspired SWRL concrete syntax proposal. Including support for cross language search and refactoring facilities;
our use of TRIG and RDF sub-graphs to embed examples in a Literate Ontology, as well as our proposal for a unit-test definition language for ontologies;-
the different graphical syntaxes we have defined in order to help non-technical business experts understand the semantics of the application; and
the explanation facilities that serve as a declarative debugger for the ontology's axioms and rules.

For more information about Logic.Tools and the Logic.Tools studio, visit:

visit our website: https://logic.tools
watch our quick tour videos: https://www.youtube.com/@logictools4513

References:

Knuth, D. E. (1992). Literate Programming. Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information.

Authors: Carlos Noguera, Maxime Van Assche

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Literate ontologies for fun and profit