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.

List of semantic reasoners

Existing semantic reasoners and related software:

Non-free software

• Bossam (software), an RETE-based rule engine with native supports for reasoning over OWL ontologies, SWRL rules, and RuleML rules.
• DLog, Resolution based Description Logic ABox reasoner that translates to Prolog (DLog).
• OWLIM, a high-performance semantic repository developed in Java and available in two versions: free SwiftOWLIM and commercial BigOWLIM. Supports a subset of OWL-Lite semantics, which can be configured through rule-set definition and selection.^[1] (OWLIM)
• RacerPro, a semantic web reasoning system and information repository (RacerPro)
• SHER, a scalable Pellet-backed OWL DL reasoner (SHER).
• OntoBroker, highly scalable SemanticWeb middleware (OntoBroker).

Free software

• BaseVISor, a versatile forward chaining inference engine specialized to handle facts in the form of RDF triples with support for OWL 2 RL and XML Schema Datatypes (BaseVISor).
• Cwm, a forward-chaining reasoner which can be used for querying, checking, transforming and filtering information. Its core language is RDF, extended to include rules, and it uses RDF/XML or N3 serializations as required. (CWM)
• Drools, a forward chaining inference based rules engine that uses an enhanced implementation of the Rete algorithm.
• Euler (EYE), a RIF-compatible backward-chaining N3 reasoner enhanced with Euler path detection. (Euler Proof Mechanism)
• FaCT, a description logic (DL) classifier. (FaCT)
• FaCT++, the new generation of FaCT OWL-DL reasoner. (FaCT++)
• Hoolet, reasons over OWL-DL ontologies by translating them to full first-order logic and then applying a first-order theorem prover. (Hoolet)
• Jena (framework), an open source semantic web framework for Java which includes a number of different semantic reasoning modules.
• KAON2 is an infrastructure for managing OWL-DL, SWRL, and F-Logic ontologies.
• Large_Knowledge_Collider or LarKC is a large scale distributed reasoner that focuses on performance by allowing incomplete reasoning
• Pellet, an open-source Java OWL DL reasoner. (Pellet)
• Prova, an open-source Semantic Web rule engine which supports data integration via SPARQL queries and type systems (RDFS, OWL ontologies as type system). (Prova)
• SweetRules, an integrated set of tools for Semantic web rules and ontologies. (SweetRules)
• HermiT, the first publicly-available OWL reasoner based on a novel “hypertableau” calculus which provides much more efficient reasoning than any previously-known algorithm. (HermiT)

Reasoner comparison

See also

• Business rules engine
• Expert systems
• Doxastic logic
• Method of analytic tableaux

External links

• OWL 2 Reasoners listed on W3C OWL Working Group homepage
• SPARQL Query Language for RDF
• Introduction to Description Logics DL course by Enrico Franconi, Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bolzano, Italy
• Marko Luther, Thorsten Liebig, Sebastian Böhm, Olaf Noppens: Who the Heck Is the Father of Bob?. ESWC 2009: 66-80
• Jurgen Bock, Peter Haase, Qiu Ji, Raphael Volz. Benchmarking OWL Reasoners. In ARea2008 - Workshop on Advancing Reasoning on the Web: Scalability and Commonsense (June 2008)
• Tom Gardiner, Ian Horrocks, Dmitry Tsarkov. Automated Benchmarking of Description Logic Reasoners. Description Logics Workshop 2006
• OpenRuleBench Senlin Liang, Paul Fodor, Hui Wan, Michael Kifer. OpenRuleBench: An Analysis of the Performance of Rule Engines. 2009. Latest benchmarks at OpenRuleBench website.
• Pronto, a probabilistic description logic reasoner.

References