Reasoning with Ontologies in Databases and Optimization Strategies

Ontologies are a new way of saving information. With ontologies not only explicit information can be represented, but also implicit one. Through reasoning and querying, this implicit information can be obtained. However, the larger the ontology gets, the slower reasoning tasks are executed. This is due to the fact that although the used main memory normally is in fact fast, it may be not large enough.

The goal of this thesis is to find out if reasoning in databases is more efficient and how this can be realized. In the end, after having done performance tests, the different methods are compared and some eventually resulting optimization strategies are illustrated.