Scalable ontology reasoning services

Abstract

This chapter presents scalable ontology reasoning technology, one of the enabling technologies for ODSD. For basic definitions about ontology and reasoning, we refer readers to Chap. 3. As to be illustrated in Chaps. 9 and 10, reasoning services will be required to perform consistency checking and to derive implicit knowledge from the ontologies. Given the large number and volume of models, their complexity and the diversities of required reasoning tasks, reasoning technologies must be scalable and efficient and support as much expressive power as possible to minimise user restrictions in modelling. Furthermore, software engineers are usually not ontology experts or logicians. In order to present reasoning results in a user-friendly manner, it is required to not only deliver the answers of queries but also provide explanations of such answers.