HermiT: An OWL 2 Reasoner

This system description paper introduces the OWL 2 reasoner HermiT. The reasoner is fully compliant with the OWL 2 Direct Semantics as standardised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). HermiT is based on the hypertableau calculus, and it supports a wide range of standard and novel optimisations that improve the performance of reasoning on real-world ontologies. Apart from the standard OWL 2 reasoning task of entailment checking, HermiT supports several specialised reasoning services such as class and property classification, as well as a range of features outside the OWL 2 standard such as DL-safe rules, SPARQL queries, and description graphs. We discuss the system’s architecture, and we present an overview of the techniques used to support the mentioned reasoning tasks. We further compare the performance of reasoning in HermiT with that of FaCT++ and Pellet—two other popular and widely used OWL 2 reasoners.