RDF Reasoning on Large Ontologies: A Study on Cultural Heritage and Wikidata

Large ontologies are available as linked data, and they are used across many domains, but to process them considerable resources are required. RDF provides automation possibilities for semantic interpretation, which can lower the effort. We address the usage of RDF reasoning in large ontologies, and we test approaches for solving reasoning problems, having in mind use cases of low availability of computational resources. In our experiment, we designed and evaluated a method based on a reasoning problem of inferring Schema.org statements from cultural objects described in Wikidata. The method defines two intermediate tasks that reduce the volume of data used during the execution of the RDF reasoner, resulting in an efficient execution taking on average 10.3 ± 7.6 ms per RDF resource. The inferences obtained in the Wikidata test were analysed and found to be correct, and the computational resource requirements for reasoning were significantly reduced. Schema.org inference resulted in at least one rdf:type statement for each cultural resource, but the inference of Schema.org predicates was below expectations. Our experiment on cultural data has shown that Wikidata contains alignment statements to other ontologies used in the cultural domain, which with the application of RDF and OWL reasoning can be used to infer views of Wikidata expressed in cultural domain’s data models.