Overview of different reasoning techniques

[scitrx]

Hello,

I've been doing some reading about semantic web technologies. Therefore I stumbled over reasoners. I'd like to get an overview of the different algorithms used in reasoning ((Hyper-)tableau, rule-based, ...). Does anyone know some document/link where I can find such information, without having to know about the mathematical foundations? Besides, how come termini like "forward chaining" and "backward chaining" into play?

Many thanks!

[Signified]

There's a good bit of info on this site

Community Wiki... please feel free to add/reorder/edit:

Pointers

• Newbie questions on reasoning

Terminology

• What's the difference between Reasoning and Inferencing?
• What is the difference between entailment and inference?
• What does the term axiom mean in ontology

Reasoning (General)

• What are the advantages of one reasoner over the other
• How is inference used in practice?
• Why is it necessary to split reasoning into T-Box and A-Box?
• Why do we need SWRL and RIF in an OWL2 world?
• RIF/SPIN needed or not (As when OWL2 seems sufficient) ?
• How do I build a reasoner?
• OWL Full and reasoning
• Implementing reasoning capabilities in triple stores

Tableau Reasoning

• OWL DL inference engines!
• Tabling / Tableaux (in reasoners) explained?

Rule-based Reasoning

• forward vs backward chaining
• What is OWL Horst reasoning?

Tags:

• reasoning, reasoner

[MichaelSchn]

As this seems to be a question on reasoning techniques in general, I would like to mention the reasoning Bible (although already about 10 years old), a so-called "handbook" that treats virtually every aspects of logic-based reasoning and where the list of chapter authors reads like a Who-is-Who of the field of computational logic: J. Alan Robinson and Andrei Voronkov (Eds.), Handbook of Automated Reasoning. The two volumes of the book have more than 2000 pages and 28 chapters. Related to the Semantic Web, Chapter 23 is about "Reasoning in Expressive Description Logics", and Chapter 3 is more generically on "Tableaux and Related Methods". The rest is on other techniques. Google Scholar has a partial version of the book.

Another book is the Description Logic Handbook, which is restricted to description logics.

[jan_f]

Hi, check out the Wikipedia Page for Description Logic. its a good starting point i'd say. especially the section about Tools and the notes and references. There is quite some information about reasoning.
But i guess the stuff will be math heavy...but i don't see a way around that.