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HermiT: An OWL 2 Reasoner

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Abstract

This system description paper introduces the OWL 2 reasoner HermiT. The reasoner is fully compliant with the OWL 2 Direct Semantics as standardised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). HermiT is based on the hypertableau calculus, and it supports a wide range of standard and novel optimisations that improve the performance of reasoning on real-world ontologies. Apart from the standard OWL 2 reasoning task of entailment checking, HermiT supports several specialised reasoning services such as class and property classification, as well as a range of features outside the OWL 2 standard such as DL-safe rules, SPARQL queries, and description graphs. We discuss the system’s architecture, and we present an overview of the techniques used to support the mentioned reasoning tasks. We further compare the performance of reasoning in HermiT with that of FaCT++ and Pellet—two other popular and widely used OWL 2 reasoners.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of Ulm, 89069, Ulm, DE, Germany

    Birte Glimm

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QD, UK

    Ian Horrocks & Boris Motik

  3. School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Iroon Polytexneiou 9, 15780, Zografou, Greece

    Giorgos Stoilos

  4. School of Information & Communication Technology, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD 4111, Australia

    Zhe Wang

Authors
  1. Birte Glimm
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  2. Ian Horrocks
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  3. Boris Motik
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  4. Giorgos Stoilos
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  5. Zhe Wang
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Correspondence to Boris Motik.

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Glimm, B., Horrocks, I., Motik, B. et al. HermiT: An OWL 2 Reasoner. J Autom Reasoning 53, 245–269 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10817-014-9305-1

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