Neha Patil (Editor)

Semantic reasoner

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit

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 logic 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 probabilistic reasoners, including Pei Wang's non-axiomatic reasoning system, and probabilistic logic networks.

Contents

List of semantic reasoners

Existing semantic reasoners and related software:

Commercial software

  • Bossam (software), an RETE-based rule engine with native supports for reasoning over OWL ontologies, SWRL rules, and RuleML rules.
  • RacerPro

    • Free to use (Closed Source)

  • Cyc inference engine, a forward and backward chaining inference engine with numerous specialized modules for high-order logic. ([1] ResearchCyc) ([2] OpenCyc)
  • KAON2 is an infrastructure for managing OWL-DL, SWRL, and F-Logic ontologies.
  • Internet Business Logic (software)—A reasoner designed for end-user app authors. Automatically generates and runs complex networked SQL queries. Explains the results in English at the end-user level.

    • Free software (open source)

  • Cwm, a forward-chaining reasoner used for querying, checking, transforming and filtering information. Its core language is RDF, extended to include rules, and it uses RDF/XML or N3 serializations as required. (CWM, W3C software license)
  • Drools, a forward-chaining inference-based rules engine which uses an enhanced implementation of the Rete algorithm. (Drools, Apache license 2.0)
  • FaCT++ Reasoner, a tableaux-based reasoner for expressive Description Logics (DL), covering OWL and OWL 2 but lacking support for key constraints and some datatypes. Written in C++. (LGPL)
  • Flora-2, an object-oriented, rule-based knowledge-representation and reasoning system. (Flora-2, Apache 2.0)
  • Gandalf, open-source decision rules engine on PHP (GPL).
  • Prova, a semantic-web rule engine which supports data integration via SPARQL queries and type systems (RDFS, OWL ontologies as type system). (Prova, GNU GPL v2, commercial option available)
  • Pellet, OWL 2 DL reasoner (AGPL, commercial option available)
  • HermiT, OWL 2 DL reasoner (LGPL)
  • ELK, OWL 2 EL reasoner (Apache 2)
  • CEL, OWL 2 EL reasoner (Apache 2)
  • jcel, OWL 2 EL reasoner (LGPL / Apache 2)
  • RACER, OWL 2 DL reasoner (BSD-3)
  • Jena (framework), an open-source semantic-web framework for Java which includes a number of different semantic-reasoning modules. (Apache Jena, Apache License 2.0)
  • RDFSharp, an open source semantic web framework for .NET which includes a semantic extension implementing RDFS/OWL-DL/custom rule-based reasoning. (RDFSharp, Apache License 2.0)

    • Applications that contain reasoners

  • Apache Marmotta includes a rule-based reasoner in its KiWi triple store.
  • dot15926 Editor—Ontology management framework initially designed for engineering ontology standard ISO 15926. Allows Python rule scripting and pattern-based data analysis. Supports extensions.

    • References

    Semantic reasoner Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA