[OWLAPI-developer] owl-api vs. Jena vs. Protege vs. pellet

[paddy j. <pad...@gm...>]

Dear OWL-API experts,

I have until now developed ontologies using the Protege GUI version 3.4.

I will probably continue to create ontologies using the GUI but would
like to also write applications that can read and write data to the
OWL-DL file also.

>From my understanding there are a number of Java API's that allow this:

OWL-API, Jena, Protege API, Pellet API.

I would like to be able to automatically populate the ontology with
instances and their respective relationships perhaps from a database
and/or a comma-delimited file for example.
I would like to convert knowledge about ontology instances into other
data formats also.

On the OWL-API website, I see it says it has an "OWL/XML parser and
writer". I presume this would allow me to take a bottom-up approach
(push data into the ontology) and a top-down approach where ontology
knowledge in converted into data suitable for other systems, for
example some command-line syntax of some sort.

I use the SWRLtab to reason about the ontology individuals (manually
added). I understand that the OWL-API, perhaps linked with the Pellet
API, provides a limited form of SWRL.
Does the SWRL api also work with the OWL-API or is that only suitable
with the Protege API?

Is there any preference as to why I should use the OWL-API over the others?

regards,
Paddy.