This package provides a collection of interface definitions that support inference over OWL ontologies. The basic strategy taken in the API is that the {@link org.semanticweb.owl.model model} package provides access to the data asserted within an OWL ontology, while this package supports basic inference over the ontologies.
The separation makes it clear exactly what kind of information we are dealing with (assertions vs. inferences) and also allows implementors to build representations of OWL ontologies without necessarily committing to implementing inference.
There are a number of different reasoning interfaces, each of which
characterizes a different kind of task. To a certain extent this is an
artificial distinction as nearly all the tasks that we wish to perform
(e.g. subsumption reasoning and given the presence of the
one-of
operator, individual reasoning) can be couched
in terms of a consistency test.
Implementations of the interface may only be able to reason with subspecies of the language. If a reasoner is asked to reason with an ontology outside its remit, an exception may be raised. This may occur either through an explicit setting of the ontology, or through a manipulation or edit of the ontology that the reasoner has been told to reason about.
@author Sean Bechhofer