Our research is motivated by the ubiquitous availability of multiprocessor computers and the observation that available Web Ontology Language (OWL) reasoners only make use of a single processor. This becomes rather frustrating for users working in ontology development, especially if their ontologies are complex and require long processing times using these OWL reasoners. We present a novel algorithm that uses a divide and conquer strategy for parallelizing OWL TBox classification, a key task in description logic reasoning. We discuss some interesting properties of our algorithm, e.g., its suitability for distributed reasoning, and present an empirical study using a set of benchmark ontologies, where a speedup of up to a factor of 4 has been observed when using 8 workers in parallel.
展开▼
