Towards Real Time Ontology Editing

Recently there has been substantial development of OWL ontology engineering tools. Such tools typically come equipped with fully functional Description Logic (DL) reasoners, as both OWL-Lite and OWL-DL are formally aligned with Description Logics. One main limitation of editors is that the underlying reasoners cannot be continuously turned on while editing large, expressive ontologies, due to the complexities of DL reasoning and desired UI response times. In this paper, we present a variety of techniques, many of which leverage our recent work on incremental DL reasoning, that aid in achieving real time DL reasoning for ontology editors. We provide an overview of the techniques and an implementation in the ontology editor Swoop.