Extracting OWL Ontologies from Agent-Based Models: A Netlogo Extension

Using OWL ontologies to represent the state and structure of a simulation at any one time has been argued to improve the transparency of a social simulation, on the basis that this information is then not embedded in the source code of the model, or in the computer’s memory at run-time. Should transparency of such a form be desirable, it would be preferable to enable it by extracting the information automatically from a running model. However, semantic differences between traditional object-oriented programming languages and description logics pose an obstacle to this. This paper presents arguments that Netlogo does not have the same semantic challenges to automated ontology extraction, and describes an extension to Netlogo (5.0) using the OWL-API (3.1.0) that extracts state and structure ontologies from an existing Netlogo model. The extension is freely available from https://github.com/garypolhill/netlogo-owl.