A Hybrid Reasoning Architecture for Business Intelligence Applications

We describe an implemented hybrid reasoning architecture that is used in an EU-funded project called MUSING (www.musing.eu) which is dedicated towards the investigation of semantic-based business intelligence solutions. The reasoning platform builds on publicly available software, such as Pellet, OWLIM, Jena, and Sesame. The project uses and extends existing OWL ontologies (e.g., PROTON) and assumes rule-based reasoning to take place on top of OWL. We describe the pros and cons of each subsystem w.r.t. the needs we have encountered during our investigation. We explain the specific reasoning architecture that is based on a sequence and a fixpoint computation of three reasoners which we might sloppily write as Pellet + (OWLIM + Jena)^*. Pellet is used for checking the initial consistency of the ontology, whereas OWLIM and Jena are employed to execute rules outside the expressiveness of OWL. However, OWLIM is way much faster than Jena, but neither has means to do numerical comparison nor arithmetic. We explain our choice why SWRL is not enough and why we believe that binary OWL properties lead to an unwanted proliferation of objects, making representation and reasoning extremely complex.