A Platform-Independent Approach for Parallel Reasoning with OWL EL Ontologies Using Graph Representation

OWL EL is a tractable fragment of OWL 2. Classification, which is the task of computing a subsumption hierarchy between concepts, plays an important role in many applications of OWL EL. The current classification methods are proposed based on the specific parallel computation platforms, thus can hardly adapt to other platforms and satisfy different needs of users or developers. In this paper, we propose a platform-independent approach to perform classification in OWL EL. We first give a novel and well defined graph formalism GEL for representing EL ontologies. Based on this formalism, we describe the classification using a platform-independent computation model, and discuss the lower bound of run-time. We further give a refined algorithm based on the proposed model, and show the correctness of the algorithm. We implement a prototype system, which can easily switch between multi-core and a distributed cluster. Finally, we conduct experiments on several real world ontologies. The experimental results show that our system outperforms two state-of-theart EL reasoning systems, and has a linear scalability on the extensions of GO ontologies.