A Mechanism to Define and Execute SWRL Built-ins in Protégé-OWL

SWRL provides a very powerful extension mechanism that allows user-defined methods to be used in rules. These methods are called built-ins and are predicates that accept one or more arguments. Built-ins are analogous to functions in production rule systems. We have developed an extension to Protégé-OWL that provides mechanisms to define Java implementations of SWRL built-ins, to dynamically load these implementations, and to invoke them from a rule engine.