hermit-reasoner | conformant OWL 2 DL reasoner that uses the direct semantics

I want to programmatically get explanations for inferred axioms in consistent ontologies, in a similar manner that one can do in the Protégé UI. I cannot find any straightforward way. I have found the owlexplanation repo, but I cannot for the life of me solve the dependency issues to set up the owlexplanation environment. I have also browsed the javadoc of owlapi regarding explanations (to avoid the other repo altogether), but I don't see anything useful beyond what I can already see browsing the Java source code.

I have thought of simply negating the inferred axiom, to get explanations through inconsistencies, but I would prefer something cleaner, and I am not sure this approach is correct anyway.

Other (possibly) useful context:

• I had used some Java years ago, but I now primarily use Python (I try to use OWL API with JPype and OWL in general with Owlready2).
• I am using HermiT reasoner (again through JPype) (according to build.xml file, latest stable version 1.3.8).
• I have managed to get explanations for unsatisfiability and inconsistency in my setup, without owlexplanation, following this example from the HermiT source code.
• I fell in the rabbit hole wanting to make a usable .jar file for owlexplanation, in order to add it in my JPype classpath. My plan went sideways when I couldn't get the Java project to build in the first place.
• I am using Intellij IDE.

I would appreciate any insight or tips.

UPDATE Jan 6, 2022:

I decided to try once more with the owlexplanation code with a clean head so here is where I am at:

• Downloaded the source code from github and extracted the zip.
• Started IntelliJ and instead from "Creating a project from Existing sources", I clicked "Open" and selected the extracted directory.
• I built the project and it did successfully.
• From Maven tools, I run clean, validate, compile and test succesfully.
• If I run "package" Maven action, it throws as error that "The environment variable JAVA_HOME is not correctly set". The thing is that if I go File>Project Structure, I see that SDK is set to 11, it's not empty.
• Additionally, from the pom.xml file I get these problems:
  • Plugin 'org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-gpg-plugin:1.5' not found
  • Plugin 'org.sonatype.plugins:nexus-staging-maven-plugin:1.6.6' not found

UPDATE Jan 8, 2022: (Trying @Ignazio's answer)

I created a new IntelliJ project, and added the Maven dependencies @Ignazio mentioned (plus some others like slf4j etc) and I got a working example (I think). Moving to my main project (using JPype), I had to manually download some .jars to include in the classpath (as maven can't be used here). These are the ones downloaded so far: