A performance comparison of ontology reasoning and rule engines

Even though ontology modeling and policy based systems were originally created for different problem spaces it became obvious in the course of time that they can both be useful tools to express restrictions in a real life situation into technically enforceable rules. One of such situations where both ontology reasoning and rule engines can be applied as technological solutions is the design of an information system that enforces restrictions related to user privacy protection. During the design of such a system, privacy related restrictions could be expressed either as rules into an ontology describing the privacy world of a user, or as a set of straightforward Jess rules. A performance comparison of the two approaches is presented in this paper.