Ontological boost for the semantic web
From industrial applications to sports websites, semantic web technologies are gaining ground in the virtual world and facilitating high-tech querying in computer technology. While effective ontologies such as OWL 2 and RDF(S) process enormous amounts of information, their performance is compromised as developers scale them down to achieve greater speed. The EU-funded SCORE (Scalable and Complete Ontology Reasoning) project investigated how to overcome this challenge by ‘repairing’ incomplete ontologies. It looked at the impact of a fully repaired ontology on scalability, aiming as well to balance the needs between complete, but inefficient, systems with incomplete yet scalable ones. Often query answering over certain ontologies is comprised by too much computational processing, requiring the need for new systems that enable better scalable query answering. To address this issue the project team worked on novel approaches and tools that can deliver scalable query answering over OWL 2 DL ontologies. It considered two different approaches to achieve this aim. One approach involved using the repairing technique to adapt the input ontology at a pre-processing stage, which could work in specific cases using a resolution-based algorithm. In technical terms, this entailed the articulation of new algorithms in order to transform relevant parts of OWL 2 DL into OWL 2 RL. The other approach addressed cases where no transformation can be accomplished, relying on partial rewriting of the ontology and representing a novel hybrid solution with a high success rate. The newly developed query techniques and ontologies have been integrated into a prototype OWL 2 DL query answering system which has been made available on the project website. The research results bode well for the future of the semantic web.
Keywords
Querying, semantic web, ontology, OWL 2 DL, OWL 2 RL
