# Pellet OWL Reasoner

## Contents

1. Introduction
2. Installation
3. Running Pellet (Command Line Version)
4. Using Pellet in Applications
   - API javadocs
5. Building Pellet
6. Mailing list

### Introduction

Pellet is an open-source Java based OWL DL reasoner. It can be used in conjunction with either Jena or OWL API libraries. Pellet provides functionalities to validate ontology species, check consistency of ontologies, classify the taxonomy, check entailments and answer a subset of RDQL queries (known as ABox queries in DL terminology).

### Installation

Pellet requires a JVM compatible with Sun's Java version 1.4 or above. You can download Sun's JVM or SDK at http://java.sun.com. If you have Java installed on your machine just unzip the Pellet distribution file to start using it.

### Running Pellet (Command Line Version)

Pellet comes with a simple command line interface to demonstrate some of its capabilities. This program provides options to find the ontology level (Lite, DL, FULL), check consistency of an ontology, find unsatisfiable concepts, display class hierarchy (with instances if desired), to answer a SPARQL query.

To run the command line version simply execute the following command

    java -jar lib/pellet.jar

Running this command will print the options available.

### Using Pellet in Applications

You can access Pellet from Java applications using one of two different APIs designed to support Jena and OWL API libraries. The functionality in both packages is almost equivalent. See the javadocs (doc/javadoc) for the details of interfaces and check out the examples directory (src/examples) for sample code. You can find the answers to some Frequently Asked Questions in Pellet FAQ.

If you are interested in a GUI, you can use SWOOP which uses Pellet for reasoning.

### Building Pellet

#### Starting from a Distribution

If you are starting from a distribution, Pellet comes pre-built, with all the required libraries are included in the zip file. To use the Pellet build system, you need Apache Ant, version 1.5 or above. You can download a copy of Ant at http://ant.apache.org/.

#### Starting from Subversion

All the required library files are included in the lib directory.

#### Compilation

Running 'ant' in the trunk directory should be enough. The resulting jar file is placed in dist/lib/pellet.jar. Running 'ant zipfile' will build a source and binary distribution in the file dist/pellet-{date}.zip

#### Building your own distribution

The ant target 'zipfile' will build the file dist/pellet-{date}.zip. The ant target 'release' will build the file dist/pellet-{version}.zip. You can change the version string by editing the build.xml file. The distribution file will include the source code, the Pellet jar file, and all supporting jar files found in the lib/ directory.

### Mailing list

There is a mailing list for questions and feedback: pellet-users@lists.mindswap.org. You can subscribe to the list and see the archives here: http://lists.mindswap.org/mailman/listinfo/pellet-users.