RacerManager has been developed to serve as an OWL-QL application server for the DL Reasoner RacerPro. OWL-QL is not only a query language but also a communication protocol among software agents, where the knowledge bases to answer a query may be located anywhere in the Semantic Web. To support this scenario RacerManager has a service oriented architecture. It offers OWL-QL support as a webservice. To do this it makes use of the OWL resaoning capabilities of the DL Reasoner. Clients such as software agents or web applications can reference and query any OWL ontology by calling the web service using standards such as SOAP and WSDL.
RacerManager supports following use cases:
RacerManager's primiary goal is to act as a configurable, scalable semantic web middleware for business applications. In order to attain this goal it has to deal with several issues:
The overall architecture and usage scenario of RacerManager can be briefly visualised as follows:
