[Myexperiment-discuss] Reasoning Support for myExperiment Sparql Endpoint

[David R Newman]

Hi All,

 

I promised recently that I would upgrade the myExperiment SPARQL endpoint so it provides RDFS reasoning.  My colleague in Southampton has now finished the latest release of the 4Store Reasoner [1], which I have just deployed on the SPARQL Endpoint.  You will notice that if you go to the SPARQL endpoint web page [2] that there is a checkbox to enable reasoning.  There is also a link [3] to explain how your results might differ depending on whether reasoning is enabled. 

 

Currently I am only allowing RDFS reasoning on the subClassOf and subPropertyOf properties.  In theory the reasoner should also support reasoning on domain and range properties but I have been experiencing some teething issues with these that I need to talk about with my colleague.  In the future I believe there are plans to support reasoning on further properties such as OWL SameAs.

 

The 4Store reasoner codebase is a forked from  4Store codebase, it is currently forked from a revision after 4Store version 1.1.2, so the issue reported by Peter about construct queries that return bindings to blank nodes that don’t actually exist should have been fixed.  I believe it also solves a problem Sean reported to me about the consistency of results that involve filtering and aggregation, e.g. show me how many of each type of workflow have been added since the 1^st of September 2009. 

 

A lot of the work my colleague have been doing is trying to ensure that his codebase differs as little as possible from the main 4Store codebase; so that when new versions or any critical bug fixes are released he can update his codebase almost immediately. In the long run he hopes that either the reasoner itself can be incorporated into the main codebase or it can be added as a plugin.  At the moment I would say it is at a Beta stage, therefore if anyone using the reasoning capability wants to report back their experiences that would be most appreciated.

 

Regards

 

David Newman

 

[1] http://4sreasoner.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

[2] http://rdf.myexperinent.org/sparql

[3] http://rdf.myexperiment.org/howtosparql?page=Using%20the%20SPARQL%20Endpoint#Reasoning