DL Reasoner vs Rule Engine: can you explain the difference?

Question

Hi, Can someone explain the differences between a DL Reasoner like Pellet/deafult OWL Reasoner and a rule engine like Jess? and their applications ?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Both Pellet and Jess can primarily be used as semantic reasoners. However Jess is a rule-based expert system which is used for providing answers to some expert needed problems. Also Jess has its own language to create rules. Namely we call them Jess Rules. Pellet uses Jena API or SWRL to define rules. So with Jess, you can write more complex rules. If you want to do a replacement between these tools, you may need to write some rules again for each type.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_reasoner

In this link you can find a comparison table between the semantic reasoners. I have not use SweetRules reasoner before but it seems that it supports both SWRL and Jess rules, therefore this reasoner can be helpfull in crossing between Jess and Pellet.