Comparison of a Deductive Database with Semantic Web Technologies: ConceptBase and Protégé/Racer

Knowledge engineering is a discipline concerned with constructing and maintaining knowledge bases to store knowledge of various domains and using the knowledge by automated reasoning techniques to solve problems in domains that ordinarily require human logical reasoning. Therefore, the two key issues in knowledge engineering are how to construct and maintain knowledge bases, and how to reason out new knowledge from known knowledge effectively and efficiently. The objective is the comparison and evaluation of a Deductive Database system with Semantic Web technology, whereby two prototypical application systems are implemented. The two prototypes are implemented in such a way that all possible features contained in each system can be explored. The issues related to the comparison of Deductive Database systems versus Semantic Web technology are evaluated and examined critically. Issues such as documentation, feasibility, expressiveness, complexity, distribution, performance and scalability are investigated in order to explore the advantages and shortcomings of each knowledge engineering approach using ConceptBase and Protégé/Racer. 1. Description of both Systems ConceptBase was chosen as the Deductive Database system to compare with Semantic Web technologies. As the application domain a food ontology is used which contains pizzas, sandwiches and salads. The two systems are described in more details in the subsections below.