Rule-based reasoning system for OWL 2 RL ontologies

Abstract

In this paper we present a method of transforming OWL 2 ontologies into a set of rules which can be used in a forward chaining rule engine. We use HermiT reasoner to perform the TBox reasoning and to produce classified form of an ontology. The ontology is automatically transformed into a set of Abstract Syntax of Rules and Facts. Then, it can be transformed into any forward chaining reasoning engine. We present an implementation of our method using two engines: Jess and Drools. We evaluate our approach by performing the ABox reasoning on the number of benchmark ontologies. Additionally, we compare obtained results with inferences provided by the HermiT reasoner. The evaluation shows that we can perform the ABox reasoning with considerably better performance than HermiT. We describe the details of our approach as well as future research and development.