Combining a DL Reasoner and a Rule Engine for Improving Entailment-Based OWL Reasoning

We introduce the notion of the mixed DL and entailment-based (DLE) OWL reasoning, defining a framework inspired from the hybrid and homogeneous paradigms for integration of rules and ontologies. The idea is to combine the TBox inferencing capabilities of the DL algorithms and the scalability of the rule paradigm over large ABoxes. Towards this end, we define a framework that uses a DL reasoner to reason over the TBox of the ontology (hybrid-like) and a rule engine to apply a domain-specific version of ABox-related entailments (homogeneous-like) that are generated by TBox queries to the DL reasoner. The DLE framework enhances the entailment-based OWL reasoning paradigm in two directions. Firstly, it disengages the manipulation of the TBox semantics from any incomplete entailment-based approach, using the efficient DL algorithms. Secondly, it achieves faster application of the ABox-related entailments and efficient memory usage, comparing it to the conventional entailment-based approaches, due to the low complexity and the domain-specific nature of the entailments.