WSML2Reasoner - A Comprehensive Reasoning Framework for the Semantic Web

The amount of data on the Internet is rapidly growing. Formal languages are used to annotate such data in order to make it machine-understandable; i.e., allow machines to reason about it, to check consistency, to answer queries, or to infer new facts. Essential for this are formalisms that allow for tractable and efficient reasoning algorithms. Particular care is demanded in efficiently responding to the trade-off between expressivity and usefulness. The updated Web Ontology Language (OWL 2) provides dialects that are restricted in their semantic expressivity for optimizing the reasoning behavior; e.g., the OWL 2 EL or OWL 2 RL profiles. Such dialects are very important to respond to the aforementioned trade-off. Profiles reflect particular requirements and yield purposeful balance between expressivity and computational complexity. The support for dialects is not only given in OWL 2, but also in the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) standards. RIF specifies formalisms for the knowl- edge exchange between different rule systems. The same applies for the WSML language that provides variants for Description Logics and rule-based reasoning. The goal remains the same, formalisms that are expressive enough to be useful, while exhibiting reasoning characteristics that can scale to the size of the Web. Leveraging this is exactly the objective of the WSML2Reasoner framework. In Section 2 we present WSML2Reasoner and our reasoners IRIS and Ell