Publication
An Efficient Direct Implementation of Equivalence Relations in OWL
Hans-Ulrich Krieger
Research Report, DFKI GmbH, DFKI Research Reports (RR), Vol. 11-01, 2011.
Abstract
This paper presents a direct implementation of the three equivalence
relations for TBox, RBox, and ABox in OWL and has been realized in the
forward chaining engine HFC.
The technique obviates the combinatorial explosion in a semantic
repository during materialization, when applying the OWL entailment
rules from ter Horst (2005) that are used in, e.g., Jena or OWLIM.
Although the approach requires some work when starting up a repository and
and querying its content, it massively pays off in the end by showing a
smaller memory footprint and allowing faster inferences, as our
measurements have shown.
As a nice side effect of this approach, the "cleanup" of ontologies can
even lead to smaller repositories, as more equivalence relation instances
are added.
Our decision to add such functionality in \hfc\ was motivated by experiences
we have gained in former projects that have dealt with information extraction
from natural language texts, represented in description logic ontologies.