[Pellet-users] Pellet performance w.r.t. the DL used to express an ontology

[Alexandre RICHARD]

Hi

I have been working on ontology-based tools dealing with astronomical 
objects and I am facing results that I find kind of puzzling in terms 
of performance. I can guess possible reasons but I am unable to 
conclude on one.

My main source of amazement is that to some extent Pellet generally 
performs much better with quite complex DLs like SHIQ than simpler ones 
like ALCIN. But then again my use case has its specificities.

To make it short I do consistency checks on a TBox-only ontology 
featuring object properties and annotations, no datatype properties. 
The ontology can be expressed using ALCIN but I find that Pellet is 
quite faster with SIN (just a transitivity constraint added on a 
property which could be transitive, except than I don't need 
transitivity for my use-cases and I tend to avoid unnecessary 
constraints by habit of avoiding higher complexity and overdefinition). 
Basically, my tests lead me to: SIN / SIQ > SHIN / SHIQ >> ALCHIQ > 
ALCIQ / ALCIN

Certainly it may be the case for implementation reasons. Perhaps 
transitivity allows some kind of pruning, hence limiting the number of 
checks, but I have no means of being sure. And after reading 
publications on Pellet and its strategies, I am still not sure about it.

So I was wondering if anyone could give me a hint about why I get such 
results and/or could give me pointers, even rather broad ones, on which 
logic(s) is likely to give me the best performance.

Cheers

Alexander Richard
-- 
     _______
    /  ~   /, Alexandre RICHARD     mailto:richard at astro.u-strasbg.fr
   / ~~~~ //  Observatoire de Strasbourg    Phone +33 (0) 390 242 477
  /______//   11, rue de l'universite     Telefax +33 (0) 390 242 417
(______(/    F-67000 Strasbourg  France