RDFS & OWL Reasoning for Linked Data

Abstract

Linked Data promises that a large portion of Web Data will be usable as one big interlinked RDF database against which structured queries can be answered. In this lecture we will show how reasoning - using RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) - can help to obtain more complete answers for such queries over Linked Data. We first look at the extent to which RDFS and OWL features are being adopted on the Web. We then introduce two high-level architectures for query answering over Linked Data and outline how these can be enriched by (lightweight) RDFS and OWL reasoning, enumerating the main challenges faced and discussing reasoning methods that make practical and theoretical trade-offs to address these challenges. In the end, we also ask whether or not RDFS and OWL are enough and discuss numeric reasoning methods that are beyond the scope of these standards but that are often important when integrating Linked Data from several, heterogeneous sources.