com.hp.hpl.jena.reasoner
Interface Reasoner

All Known Implementing Classes:

RDFSReasoner, TransitiveReasoner

public interface Reasoner

The minimal interface to which all reasoners (or reasoner adaptors) conform. This only supports attaching the reasoner to a set of RDF graphs which represent the rules or ontologies and instance data. The actual reasoner requests are made through the InfGraph which is generated once the reasoner has been bound to a set of RDF data.

Version:

$Revision: 1.10 $ on $Date: 2003/05/27 15:48:52 $

Author:

Dave Reynolds

Method Summary

InfGraph	bind(Graph data) Attach the reasoner to a set of RDF data to process.
Reasoner	bindSchema(Graph tbox) This is most commonly used to attach an ontology (a set of tbox axioms in description logics jargon) to a reasoner.
Reasoner	bindSchema(Model tbox) This is most commonly used to attach an ontology (a set of tbox axioms in description logics jargon) to a reasoner.
Model	getCapabilities() Return a description of the capabilities of this reasoner encoded in RDF.
void	setDerivationLogging(boolean logOn) Switch on/off drivation logging.
void	setParameter(java.lang.String parameterUri, java.lang.Object value) Set a configuration parameter for the reasoner.
boolean	supportsProperty(Property property) Determine whether the given property is recognized and treated specially by this reasoner.

Method Detail

bindSchema

public Reasoner bindSchema(Graph tbox)
                    throws ReasonerException

This is most commonly used to attach an ontology (a set of tbox axioms in description logics jargon) to a reasoner. A certain amount of precomputation may be done at this time (e.g. constructing the class lattice). When the reasoner is later applied some instance data these cached precomputations may be reused.

In fact this call may be more general than the above description suggests. Firstly, a reasoner that supports arbitrary rules rather than ontologies may use the same method to bind the reasoner to the specific rule set (encoded in RDF). Secondly, even in the ontology case a given reasoner may not require a strict separation of tbox and abox - it may allow instance data in the tbox and terminology axioms in the abox.

A reasoner is free to simply note this set of RDF and merge with any future RDF rather than do processing at this time.

Parameters:

tbox - the ontology axioms or rule set encoded in RDF

Returns:

a reasoner instace which can be used to process a data graph, it may be the same instance - bindSchema is not required to be side-effect free.

Throws:

ReasonerException - if the reasoner cannot be bound to a rule set in this way, for example if the underlying engine can only accept a single rule set in this way and one rule set has already been bound in of if the ruleset is illformed.

bindSchema

public Reasoner bindSchema(Model tbox)
                    throws ReasonerException

This is most commonly used to attach an ontology (a set of tbox axioms in description logics jargon) to a reasoner. A certain amount of precomputation may be done at this time (e.g. constructing the class lattice). When the reasoner is later applied some instance data these cached precomputations may be reused.

In fact this call may be more general than the above description suggests. Firstly, a reasoner that supports arbitrary rules rather than ontologies may use the same method to bind the reasoner to the specific rule set (encoded in RDF). Secondly, even in the ontology case a given reasoner may not require a strict separation of tbox and abox - it may allow instance data in the tbox and terminology axioms in the abox.

A reasoner is free to simply note this set of RDF and merge with any future RDF rather than do processing at this time.

Parameters:

tbox - the ontology axioms or rule set encoded in RDF

Returns:

a reasoner instace which can be used to process a data graph, it may be the same instance - bindSchema is not required to be side-effect free.

Throws:

ReasonerException - if the reasoner cannot be bound to a rule set in this way, for example if the underlying engine can only accept a single rule set in this way and one rule set has already been bound in of if the ruleset is illformed.

bind

public InfGraph bind(Graph data)
              throws ReasonerException

Attach the reasoner to a set of RDF data to process. The reasoner may already have been bound to specific rules or ontology axioms (encoded in RDF) through earlier bindRuleset calls.

Parameters:

data - the RDF data to be processed, some reasoners may restrict the range of RDF which is legal here (e.g. syntactic restrictions in OWL).

Returns:

an inference graph through which the data+reasoner can be queried.

Throws:

ReasonerException - if the data is ill-formed according to the constraints imposed by this reasoner.

setDerivationLogging

public void setDerivationLogging(boolean logOn)

Switch on/off drivation logging. If set to true then the InfGraph created from the bind operation will start life with recording of derivations switched on. This is currently only of relevance to rule-based reasoners.

Default - false.

setParameter

public void setParameter(java.lang.String parameterUri,
                         java.lang.Object value)

Set a configuration parameter for the reasoner. Parameters can identified by URI and can also be set when the Reasoner instance is created by specifying a configuration in RDF.

Parameters:

parameterUri - the uri identifying the parameter to be changed

value - the new value for the parameter, typically this is a wrapped java object like Boolean or Integer.

getCapabilities

public Model getCapabilities()

Return a description of the capabilities of this reasoner encoded in RDF. These capabilities may be static or may depend on configuration information supplied at construction time. May be null if there are no useful capabilities registered.

supportsProperty

public boolean supportsProperty(Property property)

Determine whether the given property is recognized and treated specially by this reasoner. This is a convenience packaging of a special case of getCapabilities.

Parameters:

property - the property which we want to ask the reasoner about

Returns:

true if the given property is handled specially by the reasoner.