A Non-Standard Approach for the OWL Ontologies Checking and Reasoning

The Semantic Web is the extension of the World Wide Web that enables people to share content beyond the boundaries of applications and websites. The understanding of Semantic Web documents is built upon ontologies that define concepts and relationships of data. Hence, the correctness of ontologies is vital. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm combined with the software engineering techniques, such as Alloy modeling language and its reasoner Alloy Analyzer to provide checking and reasoning service for OWL ontologies. First of all, we use Jena to parse OWL ontology documents. Next, the intermediate results are used as the inputs of the algorithms to generate the Alloy model. Futher, with the assistance of Alloy Analyzer, the Alloy model is checked. Experimental results show that this method can be carried out large-scale ontology reasoning and complex-property reasoning which are different from traditional ontology reasoning. Furthermore, the results provide useful information to guide the ontology modification.