Decomposition-based reasoning for large knowledge bases in description logics

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Pham, Thi Anh Le | Le-Thanh, Nhan | Sander, Peter^{; *}

Affiliations: Laboratoire I3S, Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Laboratoire I3S, UMR 6070, CNRS, Les Algorithmes, Bât. Euclide 2000, Route des Lucioles, BP121, 06903 Sophia-Antipolis, France. Tel.: +33 (0)4 9296 5160; E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract: Reasoning in a Knowledge Base (KB) is one of the most important applications of Description Logic (DL) reasoners. The execution time and storage space requirements are both significant factors that directly influence the performance of a reasoning algorithm. In this paper, we investigate a new technique for optimizing DL reasoning in order to minimize the above two factors as much as possible. This technique is applied to speed up TBox and ABox reasoning, especially for large TBoxes. The incorporation of this technique with previous optimization techniques in current DL systems can effectively solve intractable inferences. Our technique is called "overlap ontology decomposition", in which the decomposition of a given ontology into many sub-ontologies is implemented such that the semantics and inference services of the original ontology are preserved. We are concerned about how to reason effectively with multiple KBs and how to improve the efficiency of reasoning over component ontologies.

DOI: 10.3233/ICA-2008-15105

Journal: Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 53-70, 2008