Best Reasoner Available?

We have some applications that are screaming out for a semantic web solution. I'm having a hard time finding the right tools to put together a demo to convince management this is the way to go.

Oracle 10g seems to have the best RDF storage engine around. We license and use Oracle heavily, so this isn't a problem.

The real selling point is the inferencer or reasoner. I haven't found a good, solid OWL and rules reasoner out there. Certainly nothing that can scale to the millions of triples, which any application we build would require (at a minimum).

This leads me to wonder if a good semantic web application should even expect to use an inferencer. The larger question here is, What is the tool stack and information process flow for a semantic web application?

For traditional relational applications, this is well known. For instance, you need a database, some sort of object/relational mapping layer, and a set of classes that implement your business logic. The key here is that your business logic is encapsulated in your object model.

With a semantic web application, much of the business logic is encapsulated in the Ontology and the rules. Where does that logic become executed? Would it be executed by a stand alone rule/inference engine? Or does the Ontology simply provide hints to the domain model?

I'd be very curious to see where the inference engine sits in the overall application. Is it a stand alone process, or is it integrated into the domain model?

Then, what inference engine is out there and capable of working with millions and millions of triples and in a OLAP environment (high read/write situations)?

I'd love to deploy OWL, RDF, and some inference engine for some of these data rich applications. Any tips or pointers would be most welcome.

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