Incompatibility of Pellet 2.3.0 with OWL API 3.4.3?

Question

I want to build a Java application which will query an ontology using Pellet query but I am new to this field and I encounter some compatibility problems.

The ontology has been constructed using Protege 4 OWL Editor.

I have downloaded owlapi-distribution-3.4.3-bin.jar file from here and added this into my netbeans project. Furthermore I have found the DLExamples.java from here which is very useful to get you started.

For the pellet reasoner I have downloaded pellet-2.3.0.zip from here and added in my netbeans project all the files and folders that there were in pellet-2.3.0/lib (Notice that I am not sure if this is the correct way to add pellet in netbeans but I could not find a better way eg just a single jar file to add).

I found from here that in order to embed pellet reasoner to DLExamples.java I need to replace its lines 151 and 152 with just “return new Reasoner (manager) ” where Reasoner is located in org.mindswap.pellet.owlapi.Reasoner of pellet library. When I applied that change netbeans complained by saying:

no suitable constructor found for Reasoner(org.semanticweb.owlapi.model.OWLOntologyManager)
  constructor Reasoner.Reasoner(org.semanticweb.owl.model.OWLOntologyManager,KnowledgeBase) is not applicable
   (actual and formal argument lists differ in length)
  constructor Reasoner.Reasoner(org.semanticweb.owl.model.OWLOntologyManager) is not applicable
   (actual argument org.semanticweb.owlapi.model.OWLOntologyManager cannot be converted to org.semanticweb.owl.model.OWLOntologyManager by method invocation conversion)

I looked inside org.mindswap.pellet.owlapi.Reasoner and realised that its constructor definition is indeed

public Reasoner(org.semanticweb.owl.model.OWLOntologyManager manager) {
}

In other words instead of taking as a parameter an org.semanticweb.owlapi.model.OWLOntologyManager it takes an org.semanticweb.owl.model.OWLOntologyManager (Notice the difference between owlapi and owl packages).

Unless I am not doing something really wrong, there is clearly an incompatibility between owlapi and pellet. That is not normal given that pellet is supposed to provide a reasoner for owlapi right?

Are there any suggestions as to how to solve this problem? Should I switch to a different reasoner? I have tried HermiT too but when I asked a DL query which should have returned both classes and their individuals, it has only returned the classes. So I thought HermiT may not be so powerful and I decided to try Pellet with no success.

Are there any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Michael Michael · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-21T22:19:57

As mentioned here, the answer is that you cannot arbitrarily mix and match what libraries you use, you have to use the versions that are shipped with Pellet. If you do that, you won't have the no suitable constructor exception.

Incompatibility of Pellet 2.3.0 with OWL API 3.4.3?

1 Answers