Reuse of JessTab Rule Sets within the Protégé Environment

Due to their ability to provide an explicit definition of a domain, ontologies are one of the most commonly used forms of domain knowledge capture. The popular Protégé environment provides an extensive ontology and knowledge base authoring and maintenance environment in one tool. One way to reason over this knowledge base is provided by the JessTab Protégé plugin, which provides a bridge between the Java Expert System Shell (JESS) rule engine and the Protégé knowledge base. However these rules are explicitly tied to the knowledge base for which they were developed as they are required to name particular classes and slots. Although an unavoidable requirement, this can greatly hinder reusing a set of JessTab rules developed for one ontology/knowledge base with additional knowledge bases. In particular, the
developer could manually define mappings between the class and slot names in the JessTab rules and those in the second and subsequent knowledge bases. However this would be a tedious and very error prone process.