Scalable RDFS Reasoning Using the Graph Structure of In-Memory based Parallel Computing

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in RDFS Inference to build a rich knowledge base. However, it is difficult to improve the inference performance with large data by using a single machine. Therefore, researchers are investigating the development of a RDFS inference engine for a distributed computing environment. However, the existing inference engines cannot process data in real-time, are difficult to implement, and are vulnerable to repetitive tasks. In order to overcome these problems, we propose a method to construct an in-memory distributed inference engine that uses a parallel graph structure. In general, the ontology based on a triple structure possesses a graph structure. Thus, it is intuitive to design a graph structure-based inference engine. Moreover, the RDFS inference rule can be implemented by utilizing the operator of the graph structure, and we can thus design the inference engine according to the graph structure, and not the structure of the data table. In this study, we evaluate the proposed inference engine by using the LUBM1000 and LUBM3000 data to test the speed of the inference. The results of our experiment indicate that the proposed in-memory distributed inference engine achieved a performance of about 10 times faster than an in-storage inference engine.