Vipr: A Visual Interface Tool For Programming Semantic Web Rules

Semantic technologies have evolved from the initial purpose of supporting semantic integration and information exchange for the semantic web, towards a generic set of engineering tools for knowledge modelling, representation and inference. However, there is still much work required within the area of Semantic computing and the area highlights a key research challenge involving the complexity in engineering Semantic rules and associated dedicated models. Many existing tools focus on the creation of models, but concentrate on providing support for domain experts, isolating users with no knowledge engineering experience. This paper aims to address this issue by introducing a novel approach to enable the visual creation of Semantic web rules, for use within ontological models and context-aware applications. The developed tool, known as VIPR, aims to provide a user-friendly, interactive approach to aid in the creation of Semantic rules for ontologies. The work describes the design process involved in creating VIPR and presents the results of a comparative user evaluation. The research highlights the extent to which this tool has on improving the usability and intuitiveness of creating rules in an interactive environment and assesses how the tool can improve the learnability level for users with no prior knowledge engineering experience.