AKTive Workgroup Builder (AWB): Constraint Satisfaction Problem Solving over the Semantic Web

In this paper we introduce the AKTive Workgroup Builder (AWB) web application and describe how it uses distributed RDF data, defined against an OWL Lite ontology, to build and solve a user defined Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). We describe our approach to mixed mode reasoning using both ontological and rule based methods and discuss how some of the factors relating to this affect the design of the system. We explain how we utilise derivation rules, ex- pressed in the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to fur- ther enrich our knowledge. Fully quantified constraints are then expressed against this semantic data using CIF/SWRL - an extension of SWRL using our Constraint Interchange Format (CIF). To the best of our knowledge, the AWB is unique in that no other semantic web application combines these various mechanisms to perform hybrid reasoning.