RE: a question about reasoner

> From: Zhu Bin [mailto:zhubin@cai.pku.edu.cn] 
>   Rule-based reasoner and tableaux-based reasoner, which is the better
> for the reasoning in ontology?

They can do somewhat different things; you may even want to combine
them.  If you are looking at building a reasoner for OWL-DL, a
tableau-based reasoner would probably give the best combination of
functionality and performance.  If you are restricted to a rule-based
reasoner, OWL-Lite is designed to provide a good framework that is
(supposedly) implementable using rules.

Take a look at FaCT and Racer (tableaux-based reasoners), Euler
(rule-based reasoner) and TRIPLE (rule-based that calls out to
tableaux-based where necessary).  Of these, I think TRIPLE is
architecturally the most interesting.  Apologies to the folks whose work
I have missed out.  There are more links in the Reasoners section of
[1].

> Should we divided reasoning and query
> into two part in ontology?

I'll leave that to others :-).

		- Peter

[1] http://www.w3c.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/impls
--
Peter Crowther, Director, Melandra Limited