Semantic reasoner

A semantic reasoner, reasoning engine, rules engine, or simply a reasoner, is a piece of software able to infer logical consequences from a set of asserted facts or axioms. The notion of a semantic reasoner generalizes that of an inference engine, by providing a richer set of mechanisms to work with. The inference rules are commonly specified by means of an ontology language, and often a description logic language. Many reasoners use first-order predicate logic to perform reasoning; inference commonly proceeds by forward chaining and backward chaining. There are also examples of probabilistic reasoners, including non-axiomatic reasoning systems,^[1] and probabilistic logic networks.^[2]

Notable applications

Notable semantic reasoners and related software:

Cyc inference engine, a forward and backward chaining inference engine with numerous specialized modules for high-order logic.
KAON2 is an infrastructure for managing OWL-DL, SWRL, and F-Logic ontologies.

Cwm, a forward-chaining reasoner used for querying, checking, transforming and filtering information. Its core language is RDF, extended to include rules, and it uses RDF/XML or N3 serializations as required.
Drools, a forward-chaining inference-based rules engine which uses an enhanced implementation of the Rete algorithm.
Flora-2, an object-oriented, rule-based knowledge-representation and reasoning system.
Jena, an open-source semantic-web framework for Java which includes a number of different semantic-reasoning modules.
Prova, a semantic-web rule engine which supports data integration via SPARQL queries and type systems (RDFS, OWL ontologies as type system).

^ Wang, Pei. "Grounded on Experience Semantics for intelligence, Tech report 96". www.cogsci.indiana.edu. CRCC. Retrieved 13 April 2015.
^ Goertzel, Ben; Iklé, Matthew; Goertzel, Izabela Freire; Heljakka, Ari (2008). Probabilistic Logic Networks: A Comprehensive Framework for Uncertain Inference. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 42. ISBN 9780387768724.

OWL 2 Reasoners listed on W3C SW Working Group homepage
SPARQL Query Language for RDF
Marko Luther, Thorsten Liebig, Sebastian Böhm, Olaf Noppens: Who the Heck Is the Father of Bob?. ESWC 2009: 66-80
Jurgen Bock, Peter Haase, Qiu Ji, Raphael Volz. Benchmarking OWL Reasoners^{[permanent dead link‍]}. In ARea2008 - Workshop on Advancing Reasoning on the Web: Scalability and Commonsense (June 2008)
Tom Gardiner, Ian Horrocks, Dmitry Tsarkov. Automated Benchmarking of Description Logic Reasoners. Description Logics Workshop 2006