Semantic reasoner

A semantic reasoner, reasoning engine, rules engine, or simply a reasoner, is a piece of software able to infer logical consequences from a set of asserted facts or axioms. The notion of a semantic reasoner generalizes that of an inference engine, by providing a richer set of mechanisms to work with. The inference rules are commonly specified by means of an ontology language, and often a description language. Many reasoners use first-order predicate logic to perform reasoning; inference commonly proceeds by forward chaining and backward chaining. There are also examples of probalistic reasoners, including Pei Wang's non-axiomatic reasoning system, Novamente's probabilistic logic network, which tip their hat to reasoning Bayesian networks, and Pronto [http://pellet.owldl.com/pronto] - probabilistic Description logic reasoner.

emantic reasoners

Existing semantic reasoners:

* Bossam, an RETE-based rule engine with native supports for reasoning over OWL ontologies, SWRL ontologies, and RuleML rules.
* Hoolet, an implementation of an OWL-DL reasoner. [http://owl.man.ac.uk/hoolet/]
* Pellet, an open-source Java OWL DL reasoner. [http://pellet.owldl.com/]
* SHER, a scalable Pellet-backed OWL DL reasoner. [http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/sher]
* KAON2 is an infrastructure for managing OWL-DL, SWRL, and F-Logic ontologies.
* RACER system, a semantic web reasoning system and information repository
* Jena (framework), an open source semantic web framework for Java.
*FaCT, a description logic (DL) classifier. [http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/FaCT/]
*FaCT++, the new generation of FaCT OWL-DL reasoner. [http://owl.man.ac.uk/factplusplus/]
*SweetRules, an integrated set of tools for Semantic web rules and ontologies. [http://sweetrules.projects.semwebcentral.org/]
*OWLIM, a high-performance semantic repository developed in Java and available in two versions: free SwiftOWLIM and commercial BigOWLIM [http://www.ontotext.com/owlim/index.html] . Supports a subset of OWL-Lite semantics, which can be configured through rule-set definition and selection. [http://www.ontotext.com/inference/rdfs_rules_owl.html#owl_fragments] .

Reasoner comparison

ee also

* Business rules engine
* Expert systems

External links

* [http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/ SPARQL Query Language for RDF]
* [http://dl-web.man.ac.uk/dig/ DIG description logic reasoner interface]
* [http://www.inf.unibz.it/~franconi/dl/course/ Introduction to Description Logics DL course] by Enrico Franconi, Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bolzano, Italy