Does Pellet support rules? SWRL? Which Builtins?
Pellet supports reasoning with SWRL rules. Pellet interprets SWRL using the DL-Safe Rules notion which means rules will be applied to only named individuals in the ontology. No additional atoms are needed in the rules to enforce DL-safety. Pellet supports all SWRL atoms described in the specification, see below for details about which built-in functions are supported.
You don’t need to use any utility function to use SWRL in Pellet. You can directly load a file that contains SWRL rules into Pellet and rules will be parsed and processed. SWRL rules can be mixed with OWL axioms in an ontology, too. See the examples directory in the Pellet distribution for a sample program that shows how to use SWRL rules with Pellet. You can either use the OWLAPI or Jena interface; they both handle SWRL. Using the configuration option DL_SAFE_RULES, the reasoner can be configured to ignore SWRL rules. Rules support is enabled by default and only the rules that use one of the mentioned unsupported features will be ignored (or an exception will be thrown based on the value of the configuration option IGNORE_UNSUPPORTED_AXIOMS).
Which SWRL builtins does Pellet support?
As of Pellet 2.0, we support all of the SWRL builtins with the following exceptions:
- We don’t support any builtins for Lists
- We only support the first 5 Builtins for Date, Time, and Duration
Pellet will almost certainly never support the List builtins because of OWL DL restrictions; however, we will support all the date, time, and duration builtins in some future release.
