Re: OWL tools Re: Tools for 20 million triples?

* Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org> [2004-03-27 22:20-0500]
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> So it seems there are plenty of systems capable of handling lots of RDF. Are
> there any that handle OWL (in some version or other) at that scale?

I guess it depends what you mean by 'handle'.

OWL descriptions of RDF vocabularies (such as FOAF) license inferences,
ie. justify you (or your software) concluding new things from a 
dataset. Tools like Foafbot (http://usefulinc.com/foaf/foafbot) which
are built on top of generic RDF machinery (in this case Redland) can do
useful things (justified by OWL) without being complete OWL reasoners.
For eg. FOAFBot's Web crawler does a bit of 'identity reasoning' based
on knowing that some but not all FOAF/RDF properties are 
owl:InverseFunctionalProperty, ie. uniquely identifying. 

So the good news is that OWL support can be added incrementally. You
might decide just to support an understanding of inverse properties, 
eg. making a system understand that foaf:depicts and foaf:depiction say that
same thing as each other, just expressed inversely.

The bad news is that I don't have any handy references to systems that
do this sort of thing...

Dan

Received on Sunday, 28 March 2004 06:06:49 UTC