Distributed and scalable OWL EL reasoning

Abstract

OWL 2 EL is one of the tractable profiles of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) which is a W3C-recommended standard. OWL 2 EL provides sufficient expressivity to model large biomedical ontologies as well as streaming data such as traffic, while at the same time allows for efficient reasoning services. Existing reasoners for OWL 2 EL, however, use only a single machine and are thus constrained by memory and computational power. At the same time, the automated generation of ontological information from streaming data and text can lead to very large ontologies which can exceed the capacities of these reasoners. We thus describe a distributed reasoning system that scales well using a cluster of commodity machines. We also apply our system to a use case on city traffic data and show that it can handle volumes which cannot be handled by current single machine reasoners.