Performance evaluation of semantic registries: OWLJessKB and instanceStore

Service discovery is a critical task in distributed computing architectures for finding a particular service instance. Semantic annotations of services help to enrich the service discovery process. Semantic registries are an important component for the discovery of services and they allow for semantic interoperability through ontology-based query formulation and dynamic mapping of terminologies between system domains. This paper evaluates two semantic registries—OWLJessKB implementation and instanceStore—to determine the suitability of these with regards to the query response time and the overall scalability for use in mathematical services. Mathematical ontologies from the MONET project are used to undertake comparison. The results demonstrate that the performance of registries may be compared across two axes: (1) time to initialize (i.e. time to load an initial ontology into memory); (2) time to query (i.e. time to reason with an ontology loaded into memory).