OWLOOP: A Modular API to Describe OWL Axioms in OOP Objects Hierarchies

OWLOOP is an Application Programming Interface (API) for using the Ontology Web Language (OWL) by the means of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). It is common to design software architectures using the OOP paradigm for increasing their modularity. If the components of an architecture also exploit OWL ontologies for knowledge representation and reasoning, they would require to be interfaced with OWL axioms. Since OWL does not adhere to the OOP paradigm, such an interface often leads to boilerplate code affecting modularity, and OWLOOP is designed to address this issue as well as the associated computational aspects. We present an extension of the OWL-API to provide a general-purpose interface between OWL axioms subject to reasoning and modular OOP objects hierarchies. This manuscript has been submitted to the SoftwareX Elsevier journal on the 12th of January 2021, revised on the 18th of November 2021, accepted on the 14th of December 2021, and published on the 30th of December 2021.