Approximate OWL Instance Retrieval with SCREECH

With the increasing interest in expressive ontologies for the Semantic Web, it is critical to develop scalable and efficient ontology reasoning techniques that can properly cope with very high data volumes. For certain application domains, approximate reasoning solutions, which trade soundness or completeness for increased reasoning speed, will help to deal with the high computational complexities which state of the art ontology reasoning tools have to face. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the SCREECH approach to approximate instance retrieval with OWL ontologies, which is based on the KAON2 algorithms, facilitating a compilation of OWL DL TBoxes into Datalog, which is tractable in terms of data complexity. We present three different instantiations of the Screech approach, and report on experiments which show that the gain in efficiency outweighs the number of introduced mistakes in the reasoning process.