Users Guide

     The ROP system provides a visual user interface for ontology query. The GUI contains three functional modules: I/O control panel, Configuration panel, and Query panel.

     Before submitting an ontology query, user must choose the subsystem as reasoner. From the menu shown in figure 1, user can select between the ROPS and SWOPS subsystems.

Figure 1: Before starting

    The I/O control panel appears the same for both subsystems. There is no difference between using different subsystems. Figure 2 displays how to use I/O control panel. From the Input File field, user can input the file name in which the ontology is stored. In the Name Space filed, user can input the base name space. In the query process, users can then replace the long name space in the query with given abbreviation.

     In the I/O control panel, user can also control the output mode. The output can be directed to the combination of screen, result window of the GUI, and a local file. After the File check box was selected, a pop-up dialog window will notify user to choose an output file like what is shown in figure 2.

     The ROPS subsystem can recognize input format in OWL, DAML, and RDF. The system will automatically recognize the input format. Or user can select input format in the configuration panel. This selection will affect the performance and reasoning power of ROPS. The SWOPS subsystem can only recognize TPTP format.

Figure 2: I/O control panel

     Figure 3 displays the configuration panel. The combo lists on the left part control reasoners bound to ROPS subsystem. User can choose the input type and model type to configure the system how much information to be recognized. The memory mode tells the system whether to execute in memory or to bind with an outside DBMS.

Figure 3: Configuration panel

     The last combo box controls the reasoner type or no reasoner. Different types of reasoner provide different level of reasoning power. The default reasoner is the Rule reasoner, the most powerful one.

     On the right side is the configuration for the SWOPS subsystem. The memory limit control the maximum memory allocated to SWOPS. The time lime control the longest time SWOPS can execute before ending. This control avoids the infinite execution for some complex problems.

Figure 4: Query panel of the ROPS subsystem

     Figure 4 illustrates the Query panel using ROPS as query system. After the loading of the ontology and configuration, users can submit queries in this panel. This panel also includes the rule extension mechanism. Users can add new rules to the ontology to get more information and make queries simpler.

     The rules are loaded from a local file. These rules will be passed to proper format and added to the ontology model in ROPS or SWOPS. Notice that the extended rules may significantly increase the complexity comparing to the original ontology. The computing time may be unbearable. The loaded rules are shown in the inactive rules list in the bottom combo lists in the panel. User can select which rule or rules to be activate or deactivate between active rules list and inactive rules list. User can select multiple rules at the same time by press on the ctrl key during selection.

     In the query input filed, user can type in query in proper format. For the ROPS system, the input query is in RDQL syntax. If the Name space was defined in the I/O panel, user can replace the long name space with the defined abbreviation to make the query more easily to be read and input. The output will be directed to the channel defined by user in the I/O panel. Notice that user can move the division bar to expand the result filed to show more results in the window.

Figure 5: Query panel of the SWOPS subsystem

     The figure 5 is the screen shot of SWOPS subsystem. The GUI is similar to that of ROPS. The difference is they use different query syntax. SWOPS uses a Datalog-like query and it will be translated into TPTP format for the underlying Vampire prover. As a result, the output format of SWOPS is different from that of ROPS too.

Installation Guide

     The prototype of the OPS was developed in Java1.4.2. Because of the reasoner bounded, OPS can only work in Windows environment currently. It also requires Jena2.2 to be properly installed before running. Notice that the JENA_HOME environment variable must be properly defined or the Jar files for Jena2 should be copied to the %JAVA_HOME%\jre\lib\ext\ directory.

     The OPS system does not need installation. Users can simply unzip the downloaded archive to local disk. There should be a directory \Ops. Enter this directory and run the file RunOps.bat to load the GUI of OPS. The usage of OPS is in the users guild.