Rule-based OWL reasoning for specific embedded devices

Abstract

Ontologies have been used for formal representation of knowledge for many years now. One possible knowledge representation language for ontologies is the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language, informally OWL 2. The OWL specification includes the definition of variants of OWL, with different levels of expressiveness. OWL DL and OWL Lite are based on Description Logics, for which sound and complete reasoners exits. Unfortunately, all these reasoners are too complex for embedded systems. But since evaluation of ontologies on these resource constrained devices becomes more and more necessary (e.g. for diagnostics) we developed an OWL reasoner for embedded devices. We use the OWL 2 sub language OWL 2 RL, which can be implemented using rule-based reasoning engines. In this paper we present our used embedded hardware, the implemented reasoning component, and results regarding performance and memory consumption. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.