2006b, The summary abox: Cutting ontologies down to size

Reasoning in descriptive logic (DL) ontologies is known to be intractable in the worst-case. This poses a serious problem for the use of DL-based ontologies such as OWL, because in practice, most ontologies have numerous assertions about individuals in the Abox. We propose a technique to make reasoning scalable for very large Aboxes in secondary storage. The technique operates by producing a dramatically reduced summary Abox for the original Abox. Reasoning on the original Abox is reduced in most cases to reason-ing on this reduced summary Abox. We show that our techniques scale to consistency detection on ontologies with 6.5 million role assertions