Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Objective: To present a reasoner based on the hybrid approach which integrates the Description Logic (DL) reasoner with Rule Logic (RL) based reasoner for optimizing the reasoning process in ontology’s. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The idea here is to integrate the capabilities of both atomic reasoners. This hybrid reasoner will first load the ontology and make this ontology active; it will then separate the Terminological axioms (Tbox) from the Assertion axiom (Abox). It will thus call the Description Logic (DL) based reasoner for Tbox reasoning which will perform reasoning by classifying and realizing the elements of a given ontology. Afterwards it will upload the rules set for performing Rule based entailments. It will thus perform the assertion reasoning based on rules set and the given axioms. Findings: This approach integrates the effective and efficient inferencing capability of a DL algorithm based reasoner with the scalability of rule based reasoners. The experimental research shows that by following the hybrid approach the entailments can be made more efficient and scalable as compared to the other reasoners. This framework was successful in performing the Tbox entailments by calling the Pellet reasoner and it achieves a faster execution of Abox queries through the use of Generic Rule Reasoner of Jena Framework which perform the entailments in the RDF Schema and the rule set. This approach enriches the reasoning task in two ways first it separates the two schemas of any given ontology and secondly it handles the memory more efficiently. Applications: This framework gives us an efficient way for performing entailments in any kind of ontology whether it is a simple ontology or ontology based on OWL2 profile languages.

Keywords: Description Logic, Entailments, Inference, Jena, Ontology, OWL DL, OWL QL, OWL RL, Pellet, Reasoner