ProtegeReasonerAPI

Protege-OWL Reasoning API

This page describes the Protege-OWL Reasoner API that provides programmatic access to a direct or a DIG-compliant reasoner. It provides methods for consistency checking, classification, etc. of an ontology as well as methods for getting the inferred information for a particular OWL entity.

A new plugin type, the reasoner plugin, has been added that allows the integration of other reasoners into Protege. A reasoner implementing the reasoner plugin interface will be accessible through the Protege user interface the same way that the built-in reasoners are.

This Reasoner API is available since Protege 3.4 beta 118. The old Reasoner API described here has been deprecated and should not be used anymore.

If you want to use the Reasoner API with a previous version of Protege than 3.4 beta 118 (from 2007/11/16), please refer to this page.

The Reasoning API

The following sections provide a rough outline of how to use the Protégé-OWL reasoning API. The examples use an ontology that describes pizzas, which can be downloaded from here.

The inference Package

The reasoning API is encapsulated in the edu.stanford.smi.protegex.owl.inference package. The main classes that will be used are the ReasonerManager (used to obtain a reasoner) and ProtegeReasoner (an interface to the direct or DIG reasoner).

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