Scalable grounded conjunctive query evaluation over large and expressive knowledge bases

Abstract

Grounded conjunctive query answering over OWL-DL ontologies is intractable in the worst case, but we present novel techniques which allow for efficient querying of large expressive knowledge bases in secondary storage. In particular, we show that we can effectively answer grounded conjunctive queries without building a full completion forest for a large Abox (unlike state of the art tableau reasoners). Instead we rely on the completion forest of a dramatically reduced summary of the Abox. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in Aboxes with up to 45 million assertions. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.