[DL] [ANN] ELK 0.2.0 reasoner for OWL EL

[Markus Krötzsch]

We are happy to announce the release of the new

                  ELK 0.2.0
             Reasoner for OWL EL
     http://elk-reasoner.googlecode.com/

ELK is a free and open source reasoner for the lightweight
ontology language OWL 2 EL, developed by the University of Oxford
and the University of Ulm. It is based on Java and can be
controlled using the OWL API [1], Protégé [2], the Snow Owl
ontology editor [3], or a basic command line interface. ELK is
available under the Apache License 2.0.

The main new features in ELK 0.2.0 are:

* extended OWL support: property chains, top class (owl:Thing)
   and data literals (in DataHasValue),
* reduced memory usage,
* better OWL API integration and a dedicated package for using
   ELK with the OWL API,
* support for the Protégé plugin auto update feature.

ELK is very fast. It can classify the SNOMED CT ontology with
around 300,000 classes in less than 4 seconds on a modern laptop
[4]. This is achieved by highly optimized consequence-based
reasoning algorithms that can also take advantage of multi-core
CPUs.

ELK 0.2.0 is the second release of ELK. It still has only limited
support for OWL constructs and does not yet implement all
reasoning tasks that the OWL API includes. Its main features are:

* Reasoning tasks: classification and consistency checking
* Supported OWL constructs: EL+ fragment with data literals
   (incl. property chains, intersection, object property domains,
    and DataHasValue)
* OWL API bindings
* Protégé plugin (can also be used in Snow Owl)
* Command line interface
* Parser for input files in OWL 2 Functional Style Syntax

ELK can be run in all operating systems that support Java 1.5 or
above. For further details, please see the online documentation
[5].

We are continuing to develop ELK into a reasoner that covers all
OWL EL features and common reasoning tasks. Use cases, practical
application requirements and other feedback is welcome. The ELK
reasoner discussion group [6] is available for further
discussions. People who are interested in contributing can also
contact the developers [7] directly.

Development of ELK is supported by EPSRC in project "ConDOR". The
project is developed at the University of Oxford and the
University of Ulm.

Markus

P.S. Apologies if you received multiple copies of this email.


[1] http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://protege.stanford.edu/
[3] http://www.b2international.com/portal/snow-owl
[4] ISWC 2011: 
http://korrekt.org/page/Concurrent_Classification_of_EL_Ontologies
[5] http://code.google.com/p/elk-reasoner/wiki/ELK_Documentation
[6] http://groups.google.com/group/elk-reasoner-discussion
[7] The current maintainers of ELK are:
Yevegeny Kazakov, Markus Krötzsch, František Simančík.