Semantic reasoner

A semantic reasoner, reasoning engine, rules engine, or simply a reasoner, is a piece of software able to infer logical consequences from a set of asserted facts or axioms. The notion of a semantic reasoner generalizes that of an inference engine, by providing a richer set of mechanisms to work with. The inference rules are commonly specified by means of an ontology language, and often a description language. Many reasoners use first-order predicate logic to perform reasoning; inference commonly proceeds by forward chaining and backward chaining. There are also examples of probabilistic reasoners, including Pei Wang's non-axiomatic reasoning system, Novamente's probabilistic logic network, and Pronto - probabilistic description logic reasoner.

Contents

List of semantic reasoners

Existing semantic reasoners and related software:

Non-free software

Free software

Reasoner comparison

BaseVISor Bossam Hoolet Pellet KAON2 RacerPro Jena FaCT FaCT++ SweetRules OWLIM OntoBroker HermiT
OWL-DL Entailment No Unknown Yes Yes Yes Yes No complete reasoner included with standard distribution Yes Yes No No Yes Yes
Supported expressivity for reasoning R-entailment, OWL 2 RL Unknown Unknown SROIQ(D) SHIQ(D) SHIQ(D-) varies by reasoner (incomplete for nontrivial description logics) SHIQ SROIQ(D) Unknown R-entailment, OWL 2 RL OWL: SHIQ(D) (for OntoBroker 6.1: Subset of OWL-RL); F-logic: normal logic, wellfounded semantics SHOIQ+
Reasoning algorithm Rule-based, Rete Rule-based First-order prover Tableau Resolution & Datalog Tableau Rule-based Tableau Tableau Rule-based Rule-based OWL: Resolution & Datalog; F-logic: Rule-based (BottomUp, MagicSet, DynamicFiltering, QSQ) Hypertableau
Consistency checking Yes Unknown Yes Yes Yes Yes Incomplete for OWL DL Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes
DIG Support No No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No
Rule Support Yes (Own rule format) Yes (SWRL & own rule format) Yes (SWRL) Yes (SWRL—DL Safe Rules) Yes (SWRL—DL Safe Rules) Yes (SWRL—not fully supported) & own rule format Yes (Own rule format) No No Yes (SWRL, RuleML, Jess) Yes (Own format) Yes (SWRL, RIF, F-logic, ObjectLogic) Yes (SWRL—DL Safe Rules)
Version 2.0 0.9b45 Unknown 2.0.2 2008-06-29 2.0 preview 2.5.4 Unknown 1.1.8 2.1 2.x/3.x 6.1 1.3.4
Licensing Free/ closed-source (academic and research use) & Non-Free / closed-source Free/ closed-source Free/ open-source Free/ open-source & Non-Free/ closed-source Free/ closed-source Non-Free/ closed-source Free/ open-source Free/ open-source Free/ open-source Free/ open-source Free/ open-source & Non-Free/ closed-source Non-Free/ closed-source Free/ open-source

See also

External links

References