A Platform for Reasoning with OWL-EL Knowledge Bases in a Peer-to-Peer Environment

Memory exhaustion is a common problem in tableau-based OWL reasoners, when reasoning with large ontologies. One possible solution is to distribute the reasoning task across multiple machines. In this paper, we present, as preliminary work, a prototypical implementation for distributing OWL-EL ontologies over a Peer-to-Peer network, and reasoning with them in a distributed manner. The algorithms presented are based on Distributed Hash Table (DHT), a common technique used by Peer-to-Peer applications. The system implementation was developed using the JXTA P2P platform and the Pellet OWL-DL reasoner. It remains to demonstrate the efficiency of our method and implementation with respect to stand alone reasoners and other distributed systems.