Peer-to-Peer Reasoning for Interlinked Ontologies

The Semantic Web is commonly perceived as a web of partially-interlinked machine readable data. This data is inherently distributed and resembles the structure of the web in terms of resources being provided by different parties at different physical locations. A number of infrastructures for storing and querying distributed semantic web data, primarily encoded in RDF have been developed. While there are first attempts for integrating RDF Schema reasoning into distributed query processing, almost all the work on description logic reasoning as a basis for implementing inference in the Web Ontology Language OWL still assumes a centralized approach where the complete terminology has to be present on a single system and all inference steps are carried out on this system.We have designed and implemented a distributed reasoning method that preserves soundness and completeness of reasoning under the original OWL import semantics and has beneficial properties regarding parallel computation and overhead caused by communication effort and additional derivations. The method is based on sound and complete resolution methods for the description logic ALC that we modify to work in a distributed setting.