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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
