EVEE - evincing expressive DL entailments

This is the github-repository of Evee, a tool collection for explaining very expressive DL entailments and missing entailments. For general information on Evee, please refer to the section "About Evee". If you just want to try Evee with the Ontology Editor Protégé, please refer to the section "Using the Evee plugins". Information on how to install Evee and use it as a library in your own projects can be found in the section "Installing and using Evee".

For questions or feedback, you can contact Stefan Borgwardt (stefan.borgwardt@tu-dresden.de) or Patrick Koopmann (p.k.koopmann@vu.nl).

About Evee

Evee is developed at the Chair of Automata Theory at TU Dresden. Evee is a Java library and collection of Protégé plugins that support ontology engineers by explaining reasons for (missing) entailments in OWL ontologies.

• version 0.6 overhauls project structure and fixes known issues.

• Version 0.5 adds support for Protégé 5.6.0 and Java 11. It also introduces significantly easier to use build and release workflows.

• Version 0.4 introduces new proof generators for fragments of OWL 2 EL using the graph reasoning engine Nemo, which are described in the paper

  C. Alrabbaa, S. Borgwardt, P. Herrmann, M. Krötzsch: The shape of EL proofs: A tale of three calculi, in: P. Koopmann, Y. Ibáñez-García, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 38th International Workshop on Description Logics (DL), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Opole, Poland, 2025. To appear.

  Extended version: arXiv:abs/2507.21851

  

• Version 0.3 improves the existing explanation methods and was used for a user study described in

  C. Alrabbaa, S. Borgwardt, T. Friese, A. Hirsch, N. Knieriemen, P. Koopmann, A. Kovtunova, A. Krüger, A. Popovič, I. Siahaan: Explaining reasoning results for OWL ontologies with Evee, in: P. Marquis, M. Ortiz, M. Pagnucco (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), pages 709–719, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2024. IJCAI. KR in the Wild track. doi:10.24963/kr.2024/67

• Version 0.2 introduces explanations for missing DL entailments, and is described in the paper

  C. Alrabbaa, S. Borgwardt, T. Friese, P. Koopmann, M. Kotlov: Why not? Explaining missing entailments with Evee, in: O. Kutz, C. Lutz, A. Ozaki (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th International Workshop on Description Logics (DL), volume 3513 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2023. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3515/paper-1.pdf.

  Extended version: arXiv:abs/2308.07294

  

• Version 0.1 supports various methods for generating proofs of DL entailments, and is described in the paper

  C. Alrabbaa, S. Borgwardt, T. Friese, P. Koopmann, J. Méndez, A. Popovic: On the eve of true explainability for OWL ontologies: Description logic proofs with Evee and Evonne, in: O. Arieli, M. Homola, J. C. Jung, M. Mugnier (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th International Workshop on Description Logics (DL), volume 3263 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2022. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3263/paper-2.pdf.

  Extended version: arXiv:abs/2206.07711

  

Using the Evee plugins

1. Install Protégé. Evee was developed for and tested with Protégé version 5.6.9
2. Install both the protege-proof-explanation plugin version 0.1.0 and the proof utility library PULi version 0.1.0.
3. Copy the evee-protege-*.jar files from the github release page to the directory "plugins" of your local Protégé installation.
4. (Optional) Install SPASS, which is required for the Connection-Minimal Abduction solver utilizing CAPI. For Linux and macOS, please refer to the web page of CAPI for further information on how to install SPASS. For Windows, please refer to the web page of SPASS. On Windows, the Connection-Minimal Abduction solver was developed and tested with SPASS 3.5. When using the Connection-Minimal Abduction solver for the first time, you will be asked to enter the path to the SPASS executable, i.e. the file named SPASS or SPASS.exe.
5. (Optional) Install Nemo, which is required for the Nemo-based proof generators.

Some of the Evee plugins require the OWL Reasoner HermiT, which is already included as a plugin in Protégé.

Compiling and using Evee

Requirements

The Evee-Protégé plugins require the following other Protégé plugins:

• The protege-proof-explanation plugin
• The proof utility library PULi
• The OWL Reasoner HermiT, which is already included as a plugin in Protégé version 5.6.0 or newer.

These plugins also need to be installed into Protégé in order to use the Evee Protégé plugins.

Installation

Getting the latest stable version of Evee

1. You can find the pre-build and ready to use plugins on the github repo page under the Releases. Currently, the latest stable version of Evee is tagged as v0.6

2. If you want to build Evee yourself or just have a look around, clone this repository by running git clone https://github.com/de-tu-dresden-inf-lat/evee. If you have already cloned this repository in the past, run git pull origin main from the root directory of evee. These commands will create/update your local repository of Evee to the latest commit. To checkout the commit of the latest release use git checkout tags/v0.6. This command will set your local Evee-repository to the commit of this release.

Compiling evee with Maven

Run mvn clean install in Evee's root directory to build all plugins and libraries. Run the same command in a sub-directory, e.g. evee/evee-elk-proof-extractor, to build the respective modul only. All compiled jars are placed in the respective evee/{modul}/target directories.

Evee as library

All modules of Evee, except the Protégé plugins, are published on Maven Central under the namespace io.github.de-tu-dresden-inf-lat.

For easy use of Evee as a library, use evee-libs as a dependency. This .jar file contains all submodules of Evee except for the Evee Protégé plugins.

The artifact evee-libs depends on all published modules except evee-protege-core. To use it, simply add evee-libs as a dependency in your project's pom file:

<groupId>io.github.de-tu-dresden-inf-lat</groupId>
<artifactId>evee-libs</artifactId>
<version>0.6</version>

To use a single Evee module, add the respective dependency in your pom file, e.g., for evee-elk-proof-extractor:

<groupId>io.github.de-tu-dresden-inf-lat</groupId>
<artifactId>evee-elk-proof-extractor</artifactId>
<version>0.6</version>

Technical notes

Evee was developed for and tested with Java version 11.

Any Scala code of this repository was written for Scala version 2.12.6.

The Protégé plugins were developed for and tested with Protégé version 5.6.9.

The Nemo-based proof generators were tested with Nemo version 0.8.0.

On Windows, the Connection-Minimal Abduction solver was developed and tested with SPASS 3.5 for Windows.

Disclaimer

FamePlus, CAPI, SPASS, and Nemo, all libraries and programs that Evee relies on internally, were NOT created by the developers of Evee.

For further information on Fame, please see http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~schmidt/sf-fame/.

For further information on CAPI, please see https://lat.inf.tu-dresden.de/~koopmann/CAPI/.

For further information on SPASS, please see https://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/automation-of-logic/software/spass-workbench/classic-spass-theorem-prover.

For further information on Nemo, please see https://github.com/knowsys/nemo.

Lethe has been developed by Patrick Koopmann; see https://lat.inf.tu-dresden.de/~koopmann/LETHE/.