OntoExpand: SPARQL-Based Ontology Expansion and Reasoning

Abstract

The growing complexity and volume of OWL ontologies in the Semantic Web context present challenges for reasoning and knowledge expansion. Traditional ontology reasoners often face high computational costs, limiting their scalability and real-time applicability. Additionally there are other situations where reasonners crash and are not able to expand the ontology (for example, if your pattern includes property chains involving an irreflexive relation). This paper introduces OntoExpand, a new methodology for ontology expansion that uses SPARQL CONSTRUCT queries as an efficient alternative to conventional reasoning techniques. In OntoExpand we have created a mapping between OWL axioms and CONSTRUCT queries that are able to generate the new triples. These inferred triples are then reintegrated into the ontology using SPARQL INSERT queries, enabling incremental knowledge enrichment. This approach improves performance, reduces computational overhead, is pattern driven allowing a more granular expansion control and seamlessly integrates with SPARQL endpoints. OntoExpand is evaluated on multiple ontologies with varying sizes and complexities, demonstrating its scalability and practical utility in dynamic, ontology-driven environments. The results show that OntoExpand offers a viable and efficient mechanism for reasoning and expanding OWL ontologies, making it suitable for large-scale Semantic Web applications where traditional reasoning may be infeasible.