Inference Engines

In semantic web technology tools like TopBraid, inference engines are generally used to derive new (“inferred”) statements from existing (“asserted”) statements. When you think of the assets in an asset collection as the input statements, an inference engine looks at the defined classes of these assets and, typically, to rules that are associated with these classes. It then applies these rules to the assets to compute new statements.

TopBraid’s main inferencing engine is the SHACL Rules Engine while the SPIN Rules Engine is primarily left for legacy purposes - SPIN was an older predecessor of SHACL.

Contents:

• SHACL Rules Engine
• SPIN Rules Engine

Further Reading on TopBraid

• Introduction to EDG