MORe: Modular combination of OWL reasoners for ontology classification

Abstract

Classification is a fundamental reasoning task in ontology design, and there is currently a wide range of reasoners highly optimised for classification of OWL 2 ontologies. There are also several reasoners that are complete for restricted fragments of OWL 2, such as the OWL 2 EL profile. These reasoners are much more efficient than fully-fledged OWL 2 reasoners, but they are not complete for ontologies containing (even if just a few) axioms outside the relevant fragment. In this paper, we propose a novel classification technique that combines an OWL 2 reasoner and an efficient reasoner for a given fragment in such a way that the bulk of the workload is assigned to the latter. Reasoners are combined in a black-box modular manner, and the specifics of their implementation (and even of their reasoning technique) are irrelevant to our approach. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.