Section: New Software and Platforms

Cogui

Cogui is a tool for building and verifying knowledge bases. It is a freeware written in Java (version 1.6). Currently, it supports Conceptual Graphs and import/export in RDFS and Datalog+.

• Participants: Alain Gutierrez, Michel Leclère, Michel Chein, Marie-Laure Mugnier and Madalina Croitoru

• Contact: Michel Leclère (scientific contact) and Alain Gutierrez (technical contact)

• URL: http://www.lirmm.fr/cogui/

Objectives: Cogui is a visual tool for building conceptual graph knowledge bases (KB). It allows to create a KB, to edit its structure and content, and to control it. The KB can be serialized in the XML. Imports and exports from and to RDFS are also provided, as well as from and to the Datalog+ (DLGP) format that we defined for existential rules. Wizards allow to analyze and check facts with respect to some constraints, as well as to query them while taking into account inferences enabled by the ontology.

Users community:Research: MIMOS (National R&D center in information and communication technology, Malaysia http://www.mimos.my/ ), Defence R&D Canada, our partners in INRA, CIRAD, as well as a new collaboration with the Inria team Imagine. Education: Used in knowledge engineering in universities of Nice, Strasbourg, Montpellier, Sheffield, as well as in the engineering school of Tarbes.

Impact: internal use in several EU or National projects. We expect a broader audience by using Cogui as a graphical ontology modeling tool for our other software Graal, the communication being done through our DLGP format http://www.lirmm.fr/~mugnier/graphik/kiabora/downloads/datalog-plus_en.pdf .

State of the art: To the best of our knowledge, Cogui is the only ontology editing tool able to do reasoning with conceptual graph rules (equivalent to existential rules). Many tools exist for DLs and Semantic Web languages (e.g. Protégé http://protege.stanford.edu mainly designed for description logics and TopBraid Composer http://www.topquadrant.com/ designed for RDF and SPIN rules, which are rules without existential variables).

Misc.: Cogui is written in Java and has been part time developed since 2005 by Alain Gutierrez (approx. 50 man months). First developed as an interface communicating with the conceptual graph reasoner Cogitant http://cogitant.sourceforge.net/ , it has become a standalone tool, integrating more and more reasoning features.

New features: This year, we mainly focused on improving the compatibility with the semantic web languages. The main improvements are the following:

• integration of the parser using our new textual format DLGP 2.0 ( 6.1 ).

• a new repository is available to store the projects. It facilitates collaborative work combined with a version control software (a feature developed for Qualinca combined with GIT).

• ergonomics: rule engine and query assistants have been redesigned, several graphical editor behaviors have been improved.

• A backward chaining rule evaluation algorithm, with lazy computation of rule bodies, has been developed for the kind of Datalog rules used in the system SudoQual.