Information Systems Group
Hermit OWL Reasoner
The New Kid on the OWL Block
Overview
HermiT is a reasoner for ontologies written using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Given an OWL file, HermiT can determine whether or not the ontology is consistent, identify subsumption relationships between classes, and much more.
HermiT is the first publicly-available OWL reasoner based on a novel “hypertableau” calculus which provides much more efficient reasoning than any previously-known algorithm. Ontologies which previously required minutes or hours to classify can often by classified in seconds by HermiT, and HermiT is the first reasoner able to classify a number of ontologies which had previously proven too complex for any available system to handle.
Using HermiT
Using HermiT with Protégé
HermiT can serve as a reasoner plug-in for the Protégé-OWL editor. To use HermiT in Protégé, place HermiT.jar in Protégé’s plugins directory. The next time you launch Protégé, HermiT will appear as an option in the Reasoner menu.
Using HermiT from the command line
HermiT provides a command-line interface for common reasoning tasks, including classification and query answering.
Using HermiT in Java applications
HermiT's client interface supports ontologies and concepts described using the Manchester OWL API; we maintain an online copy of the javadoc for the version of the OWL API included as a part of HermiT.
News
HermiT 0.9.3 is now available
Version 0.9.3 extends the datatype support available in previous versions of HermiT.