How to choose a reasoner over another

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#1

Dear people,

I am about to evaluate (mostly) opensource reasoners like pellet, fact++, hermit, ... . So until now I've found some papers benchmarking reasoners (there aren't a lot), been on their respective homepages and so on, but still I find it hard to find arguments why one reasoner is better than another (considering for example the ones named above). Can anyone help me find a reasonable :-) approach to choosing the adequate reasoner? The application is not yet elaborated (the ontology language is not picked yet), so something like a list of general features, strength, weaknesses and the like would be great. Anyone having experiences with soundness, completeness, performance, ... of different reasoners?

Many thanks!

#2

See this question and its answers: http://answers.semanticweb.com/questions/1595/what-are-the-advantages-of-one-reasoner-over-the-other

#3

scitrx,

As per your comment on Antoine's answer, I guess the only concrete answer is to try both of them and test their performance/reliability/scale etc. for your scenario.

I hope this answer doesn't come across as flippant, but trial-and-error is definitely the most practical way to go (and is commonly used by implementers who want to choose triple stores, for example). Like any system, your mileage may vary according to your scenario.