P2P-based publication and sharing of axioms in OWL ontologies for SPARQL query processing in distributed environment

Abstract

OWL ontologies are used to represent knowledge in web. In recent years, with the wide application of Semantic Web, large numbers of OWL ontologies have appeared on Internet, especially, in some virtual knowledge communities. These ontologies are distributed in different sites and provide an amount of knowledge to query. But, it has become a pressing issue that, given a semantic query, how to efficiently gather the related knowledge from these ontologies located in different sites to process it. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a P2P-based approach to publish axioms in sharable ontologies and freely sharing them in an open distributed environment. Given a query of SPARQL, this approach can automatically gather published axioms related to the query to process the query. As a knowledge sharing approach, our approach can directly share axioms coming from different ontologies on different nodes. It overcomes limitations of those approaches which focus on how to locate related ontologies for a query. We also conducted two experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and the efficiency of our approach. The experimental results demonstrated that it is effective and efficient. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.