inference

 I am new in this group. After reading the specifications of RDF, RDF-
Schema and OWL, i have some questions about inference:
  1) In the RDF concepts and abstract syntax document there are many 
references to "inference". But as far as i know from the Formal 
Semantics specification of RDF, RDF doesn't define any "inference or 
reasoning engine". RDF defines "entailment" which appears to be a way 
of RDF-graph matching, but doesn't provide any actual inference 
capability.
 2) I read in a paper about DAML+OIL that OIL is based on a reasoning 
engine called FAcT, based on descriptive logic. Nevertheless i haven't 
read a word about any reasoning engine for inference in the OWL 
specifications. The specifications appear to be rather oriented to 
teach how to write ontologies. Moreover, OWL makes the open world 
assumption and this may yield to indecidability...
3) As far as i know there is no reference to a reasoning engine in RDF-
Schema

¿Can anybody help me?

Thanks 

   Bernardo Cuenca
   University of Valencia

Received on Friday, 21 February 2003 09:59:12 UTC