Re: Performance issues with OWL Reasoners (Was RE: Playing with sets in OWL...)

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, Kashyap, Vipul wrote:

>
>
> OWL reasoners support two types of reasoning:
>
> 1. ABox reasoning (reasoning about instance data). Scalability here is being
> achieved here by leveraging relational database technology (which is
> acknowledged to be scalable) and mapping OWL instance reasoning operations to
> appropriate SQL queries on the underlying data store. I believe most OWL
> reasoners follow this strategy
>
> There's an interesting paper by Alex Borgida and Ron Brachman in SIGMOD 1993
> which presents this approach, title "Loading data into description reasoners"
>
> 2. TBox reasoning scalability is a challenge, especially at the scale of 100s of
> thousands of classes found in medical ontologies. Would love to hear from DL
> experts on this issue.

In my experience, there is a definite ceiling to the size of ontologies 
that 'traditional' tableaux reasoners can handle that necessitate [1]
considerations of how to fragment large ontologies.  I think biomedical 
domain ontologies push this ceiling (perhaps) more so than others and 
personally I've been investigating the use of 'traditional' Logic 
Programming (production systems) for Description Logic reasoning.  In 
particular, time-tested production system algorithms (such as RETE) are 
better suited for reasoning at such scales.

That's been my experience anyways.

[1] http://www.co-ode.org/resources/papers/seidenberg-www2006.pdf
[2] http://web.mit.edu/sloan-msa/Papers/4.12.pdf

>
> ---Vipul

Chimezie Ogbuji
Lead Systems Analyst
Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
9500 Euclid Avenue/ W26
Cleveland, Ohio 44195
Office: (216)444-8593
ogbujic@ccf.org

Received on Thursday, 14 September 2006 15:58:15 UTC