OWL reasoning from command line with minimal dependencies

Question

I have an OWL file in rdf/xml syntax which contains an asserted ontology. I want to apply an OWL DL reasoner to derive additional axioms. I know I could open the file in protegé and apply the reasoner there. However I look for a command line solution because I want to automate that process in a script.

I am aware that owlready2 comes with reasoners Pellet and Hermite included as a binary file (.jar) but they seem quite outdated (see e.g. this repo), as Pellet 3.0 has become closed source.

I tried to install https://github.com/Galigator/openllet but failed to build it on my machine.

Is there any (preferable FLOSS-licenced) OWL DL reasoner available which can be easily installed and applied via command line?

Answer 1

You can use ROBOT that is used extensively in the biological ontology community in pipelines. To reason using ELK you can use the following command:

robot reason --reasoner ELK \
  --input ribosome.owl \
  --output results/reasoned.owl

For more details see ROBOT docs on reasoning.

Answer 2

Due to the encouragement in the question's comments I managed to build openllet. Here I document the steps:

• Install up-to-date java (see e.g. here https://techviewleo.com/how-to-install-temurin-openjdk-on-debian/)
• Install up-to-date maven (see https://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/maven-in-five-minutes.html)
• Clone https://github.com/Galigator/openllet/
• Run mvn package in the project root
  • Note: currently some test cases might fail
• Go to openllet/tools-cli/target/openlletcli/bin/ and run ./openllet classify your-ontology.rdf.xml
  • Note: openllet is a shell script which sets some paths and then executes the appropriate java class.