[DL] KAON2 OWL Reasoner release

[Pascal Hitzler]

***Now with DIG Interface***
***High-performance OWL DL reasoner***

The AIFB and the FZI Institute at the University of Karlsruhe, in 
cooperation with ontoprise GmbH, are pleased to announce KAON2 -- a new 
tool for management of OWL ontologies and reasoning.  The following 
functionalities are provided by the tool:

- KAON2 provides an integrated API for reading, writing, and management 
of OWL DL ontologies extended with SWRL rules. Currently, OWL RDF and 
OWL XML file formats are supported.

- KAON2 provides a built-in reasoner for OWL DL (except nominals and 
datatypes), extended with DL-safe subset of SWRL. (I.e. KAON2 fully 
supports SHIQ extended with DL-safe rules.)

Reasoning is based on novel algorithms, which reduce an OWL ontology to 
a (disjunctive) datalog program. These algorithms allow KAON2 to handle 
relatively large ontologies with high efficiency. Its performance 
compares favorably with other state-of-the-art OWL DL reasoners. 
Detailed performance evaluations will shortly be available at 
http://kaon2.semanticweb.org.

- KAON2 supports the answering of conjunctive queries expressed in SPARQL.

- KAON2 can be used either as a library from other applications,
or in server mode. In the latter case, KAON2 is started as a server 
process, and clients can connect to the server using appropriate APIs.

- KAON2 supports the DIG interface, and can therefore be used with 
ontology editors such as Protégé or OilEd.

- KAON2 can access information stored in relational databases based on 
mappings between ontology entities and database tables.

KAON2 is available free of charge for non-commercial usage. For download 
and more information about the tool, the supported formalisms and the 
reasoning algorithms, please visit the following Web page:

     http://kaon2.semanticweb.org/

Please do not hesitate to contact us for further information about KAON2.

Boris Motik
Peter Haase
Pascal Hitzler
Rudi Studer

-- 
Dr. Pascal Hitzler
Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, 76128 Karlsruhe
email: hitzler at aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de    fax: +49 721 608 6580
web:   http://www.pascal-hitzler.de   phone: +49 721 608 4751
        http://www.neural-symbolic.org
        http://www.iccs-06.hum.aau.dk