Framework for an automated comparison of description logic reasoners

Abstract

OWL is an ontology language developed by the W3C, and although initially developed for the Semantic Web, OWL has rapidly become a de facto standard for ontology development in general. The design of OWL was heavily influenced by research in description logics, and the specification includes a formal semantics. One of the goals of this formal approach was to provide interoperability: different OWL reasoners should provide the same results when processing the same ontologies. In this paper we present a system that allows users: (a) to test and compare OWL reasoners using an extensible library of real-life ontologies; (b) to check the "correctness" of the reasoners by comparing the computed class hierarchy; (c) to compare the performance of the reasoners when performing this task; and (d) to use SQL queries to analyse and present the results in any way they see fit. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.