Comparison of Pellets, FaCT and HermiT

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Comparison of Pellets, FaCT and HermiT

Course UNIK4710, UNIK9710
Title Comparison of Pellets, FaCT and HermiT
Lecture date 2013/04/12
presented by Josef Noll
Objective This lecture provides an introductory to the comparison of selected reasoners
Learning outcomes Having joined this lecture, you will
  • understand the goals of applying reasoning
  • provide answers on why they are that many reasoners
  • list the Protege 4.2 reasoners
  • explain key aspects of reasoning
  • Reasoner Comparison: HermiT, Fact++ and Pellets; internal versus external reasoning
Pensum (read before)
References (further info) * http://answers.semanticweb.com/questions/12112/what-are-the-differences-among-pellet-hermit-and-fact
Keywords Reasoning, FaCT, Pellets, HermiT

this page was created by Special:FormEdit/Lecture, and can be edited by Special:FormEdit/Lecture/Comparison of Pellets, FaCT and HermiT.


Note: streaming starts only at 11:00h

Tasks

We move to Protege 4.2, well knowing that this version has challenges, e.g. SWRL creation, relation of object properties.

Please prepare

  • more complex rules using SWRL
  • a presentation of your envisaged final application

Through these excercises you will be able to evaluation what can or can't be done in Protege 4.2

Addressed challenges

  • time stamp of information
  • number (real, double) comparison
  • object properties comparison

Lecture notes

  • Reasoner Comparison (by Josef): Comparison_of_Pellets,_FaCT_and_HermiT|Comparison of HermiT, Fact++ and Pellets
  • internal versus external reasoning

Lecture notes 2013


Presentation

Title
Reasoning
Author
Josef Noll
Footer
Comparison of Pellets, FaCT and HermiT
Subfooter
UNIK4710/UNIK9710


⌘ Reasoner

Reasoner overview.png

The goal of a reasoner is to derive information from a knowledge base. The reasoner is involved through an inference engine, e.g. the Jess engine involves a Pellet reasoner.

W3 (World wide web consortium) has published a list of reasoners [1]

⌘ Examples of reasoners

FaCT++ is an open-source tableaux-based OWL 2 DL reasoner. It is implemented in C++ and shows exceptional performance on expressive ontologies.

  • Fully conformant with OWL DL except for keys and some datatypes
  • new developed based on ideas from FaCT

HermiT can determine whether or not the input ontology is consistent, identify subsumption relationships between classes, and much more.

  • Based on a novel hypertableau algorithm,
  • efficient reasoning
  • Fully conformant

Pellet is an open-source Java OWL DL reasoner

  • developed by
  • tableau based decision procedure

Jena is an open source framework, including reasoning modules

⌘ Terminology

Assertional Box (Abox)

  • contains assertions about individuals,i.e. OWL facts such as type, property-value...
  • Realizing the ABox, i.e. computing the most specific concept(s) that each individual is an instance of.
  • Example: all people being students

Terminological Box (Tbox)

  • contains axioms about classes, i.e.OWL axioms such as subclass, equivalent class...
  • Example: 'Class:Pizza has subclass:American Pizza'

Knowledge Base (KB):

  • A combination of an ABox and a TBox, i.e.a complete OWL ontology.

major use cases:

  • Frequent ABox changes (situation classification) and
  • rare ABox changes (social networks).

⌘ Reasoner comparison

Good intro from Bock et al.[2]

  • open source versus other licenses
  • language, portability
  • logic support (e.g. OWL DL)
  • performance:
    • load time
    • query time
  • addressing: Language complexity, and size of ontology

Conclusions from Bock et al.

  • reasoners that employ a simple rule engine scale very well for large ABoxes, but are in principle very limited to lightweight language fragments,
  • classical tableau reasoners scale well for complex TBox reasoning tasks, but are limited with respect to their support for large ABoxes,
  • the reasoning techniques based on reduction to disjunctive datalog as implemented in KAON2 scale well for large ABoxes, while at the same time they support are rich language fragment.

⌘ Pellet

based on a presentation by Susana: Media:Pellet_Reasoner.pdf

  • Pellet is an open-source Java based OWL DL reasoner, see Pellets-based_reasoning
  • can be used with Jena and OWL API libraries.

Features:

  • Consistency checking: ensures that an ontology does not contain any contradictory facts.
  • Concept satisfiability: checks if it is possible for a class to have any instances.
  • Classification: computes the subclass relations between every named class to create the complete class hierarchy.
  • Realization: computes the direct types for each of the individuals.

⌘ Main modules

  • Parsing and Loading: Pellet include different submodules that can load ontologies from different representations (Jena, WonderWeb..).
  • Tableaux Reasoner: has the functionality of checking the consistency of an ontology by constructing a graph from the Abox.
    • class relations: subsumption, satisfiability, and classification
  • Datatype Reasoner: is responsible for checking if the intersection of datatypes is consistent or not.
  • Knowledge Base Interface: makes decisions to check the consistency of the ABox, when to classify all the concepts or when to realize all the individuals and answer queries.
  • ABox Query Engine for retrieval, conjunctive query answering

⌘ Reasoner outcome

PelletsReasonerOutcome.png

Reasoners detect inconsistent ontologies but the diagnosis and resolution of the bug is not supported at all.

  • Pellet contains two debugging services that help explain why the inconsistency occurs:
    • service clash detection is used to pinpoint the root contradiction or clash in the completion graph;
    • axiom tracing is used to extract the relevant source axioms from the ontology responsible for the clash.

⌘ Discussion

  • internal consistency check versus external rules
  • implementation of external rules
    • Example: Jess Engine in Protege 3.x
    • Example: Rule tab in Protege 4.x
  • Rules are not limited to SWRL define your own "custom built-ins"


References

  1. http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Implementations
  2. Jürgen Bock, Peter Haase, Qiu Ji, Raphael Volz, "Benchmarking OWL Reasoners", [1]