Dynamic Ontologies and Semantic Web Rules as Bigraphical Reactive Systems

We show how a subpart of OWL ontologies and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules can be represented as bigraphs and bigraphical reaction rules. While OWL allows for defining a static ontology and SWRL allows for inferring and adding more information to an ontology, we show that the bigraphical representation of ontologies and rules naturally allows for more general dynamic changes and modification of ontologies. We describe how the representation is implemented in BigRED, a recently developed Eclipse-based bigraphical editing tool allowing to simulate and perform state exploration in the defined systems using the BigMC bigraph model checker which is integrated in the BigRED editor. We discuss the potential uses of the approach for model-driven design and analysis of context-aware systems, and propose a first naive method to deal with the frame and ramification problems in the bigraphical ontology.