Developing Indian medicinal plant ontology using OWL and SWRL

Abstract

Semantic web, future web, will revolutionize the world with machine knowledge processing capabilities. Ontology is the building block of the semantic web. Earlier research on ontology design methodologies shows that manual construction of ontology is a complex process and it is very hard for a designer to develop a consistent ontology. In this paper, we present a methodology based on the usage of protégé 3.4.4 for developing and inferring the Indian medicinal plant ontology. Medicinal Plant Ontology is one of the useful ontology for people. Medicinal plants are belonging to the medicine category. The medicinal plants are very useful for curing diseases. The parts of the plants are also useful as a medicine for curing the diseases. The people should know all the properties of the plants such as height, color, taste. As per the design of Indian medicinal plant ontology, the Plant is implemented as a subclass of owl:Thing. Flowering plants, Non-Flowering plants, Parts of plants, Special names are implemented as a subclass of Plant. F-Plant-names is implemented as a subclass of Flowering plants. This paper describes the features of Protégé 3.4.4, the usage of inference rules framed by using SWRL, query by SQWRL and the inconsistency checking by Pellet reasoner. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.