A comparison of reasoning techniques for querying large description logic aboxes

Many modern applications of description logics (DLs) require answering queries over large data quantities, structured according to relatively simple ontologies. For such applications, we conjectured that reusing ideas of deductive databases might improve scalability of DL systems. Hence, in our previous work, we developed an algorithm for reducing a DL knowledge base to a disjunctive datalog program. To test our conjecture, we implemented our algorithm in a new DL reasoner KAON2, which we describe in this paper. Furthermore, we created a comprehensive test suite and used it to conduct a performance evaluation. Our results show that, on knowledge bases with large ABoxes but with simple TBoxes, our technique indeed shows good performance; in contrast, on knowledge bases with large and complex TBoxes, existing techniques still perform better. This allowed us to gain important insights into strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.