A Parallel Shared-Memory Architecture for OWL Ontology Classification

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) plays an important role in the semantic web to represent domain knowledge using classes, properties, and individuals. OWL reasoners analyze ontologies and offer inference services such as class satisfiability and subsumption. Ontology classification is an important and widely used service that computes a taxonomy of all classes occurring in an ontology. It can require significant amounts of runtime but most OWL reasoners do not support any kind of parallel processing. We present a novel thread-level parallel architecture for ontology classification that is ideally suited for shared-memory SMP servers, where each thread can be mapped to a core on a one-to-one basis. We evaluated our prototype implementation with a set of real-world ontologies. Our experiments demonstrate a very good scalability resulting in a speedup that is linear to the number of available cores.