Rules are increasingly being used to represent knowledge in ontology-based systems on the Semantic Web. As the size of such rule bases increases, users face the age old problem in understanding and managing the complexity of the knowledge represented by the rules. To support rapid exploration of rule bases and meet the scalability goals of the Semantic Web, techniques are needed to provide simplified interpretations of rules as well as high-level abstractions of their computational structures. To address this problem, we have implemented a rule management tool called Axiomé. Axiomé was developed as a Protégé-OWL plug-in and supports visual rule base exploration, automated rule categorization, rule paraphrasing, and rule elicitation functionality with the goal of facilitating the management of large SWRL rule bases.
