Energy-efficiency of OWL reasoners—frequency matters

Abstract

While running times of ontology reasoners have been studied extensively, studies on energy-consumption of reasoning are scarce, and the energy-efficiency of ontology reasoning is not fully understood yet. Earlier empirical studies on the energy-consumption of ontology reasoners focused on reasoning on smart phones and used measurement methods prone to noise and side-effects. This paper presents an evaluation of the energy-efficiency of five state-of-the-art OWL reasoners on an ARM single-board computer that has built-in sensors to measure the energy consumption of CPUs and memory precisely. Using such a machine gives full control over installed and running software, active clusters and CPU frequencies, allowing for a more precise and detailed picture of the energy consumption of ontology reasoning. Besides evaluating the energy consumption of reasoning, our study further explores the relationship between computation power of the CPU, reasoning time, and energy consumption.