Publication
An Efficient Implementation of Equivalence Relations in OWL via Rule and Query Rewriting
Hans-Ulrich Krieger
In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Semantic Computing. IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC-2013), September 16-18, Irvine, CA, USA, IEEE, 9/2013.
Abstract
This paper presents an implementation of the three equivalence relations in
the language specification of OWL.
The approach described here has been realized in the forward chaining engine HFC
(Krieger, 2012) that we have developed over the last years and that is comparable
to popular engines, such as OWLIM or Jena.
The proposed technique obviates the combinatorial explosion attributed to
equivalence relations in a semantic repository during materialization, when
applying the OWL entailment rules from ter Horst (2005) or when using
one's own custom rules.
Although the approach requires a little work when (i) starting up a repository
(cleaning up data, rewriting rules) and (ii) querying its content (replacing
individuals by their proxies, and vice versa), it pays off in the end as our
measurements have proven by showing a smaller memory footprint and allowing
faster inferences than the standard brute-force approach which multiplies out
everything.