DIRE - Distributed Resolution for Expressive Ontology Networks
 

DIRE is developed as part of the Emmy-Noether Group Grant for Supporting semantic information processing for complex applications using distributed knowledge representation and reasoning.


Method

The idea of DIRE is to take advantage of distributed computation for answering queries to a set of linked ontologies without merging all ontologies and copying all axioms to one site. The method consists of a resolution calculus applied to every ontology separately and a communication strategy that defines propagation of axioms between the reasoner instances.

For ALC ontologies, the resolution calculus is ordered resolution, for ontologies containing number restrictions the more involved basic superposition calculus is necessary to deal with the induced equalities. The communication strategy is based on the top symbols of terms that are unified on application of inference rules.


C Implementation based on SPASS

Our first distributed resolution implementation is heavily based on the first order prover Spass developed at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken. For turning Spass into a distributed reasoner (i.e. adding the "Distributed" option) we added support for sending and receiving clauses. A set of received clauses is treated like a set derived from a given clause, i.e. it is forward and backward reduced with respect to the local clause list before adding the non redundant received clauses. The version DIRE_2010 features dynamic allocation of clauses for improving the workload balance. The last version DIRE_2012 is based on YagoSPASS, a version of SPASS that is optimized for transitivity and large input.

Download

For the current prerelease there is not much documentation available apart from the documentation provided for SPASS. For more information contact Anne Schlicht.


Implementation in Java

The second implementation is provided by Philipp Nowakowski, it uses the actor framework AKKA. This implementation is easier to install and run but a bit slower. For download and installation intructions please refer to

http://github.com/nowi/DIRE


Publications

1.   Anne Schlicht and Heiner Stuckenschmidt. Peer-to-peer Reasoning for Interlinked Ontologies. International Journal of Semantic Computing, 2010, Special Issue on Web Scale Reasoning.
2.   Anne Schlicht and Heiner Stuckenschmidt. Distributed Resolution for Expressive Ontology Networks (best paper award). Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, 2009.
3.   Anne Schlicht and Heiner Stuckenschmidt. Distributed Resolution for ALC. Proceedings of the The 21st International Workshop on Description Logics (DL2008), Dresden, Germany, 2008.
4.   Anne Schlicht and Heiner Stuckenschmidt. Towards Distributed Ontology Reasoning for the Web. 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, 2008.