Techniques for processing ontologies include a computer-implemented method of processing an ontology. The method includes storing data in an ontology and partitioning the ontology into a plurality of partitions. The partitions are distributed among a plurality of reasoner instances. The reasoner instances are directed to reason the partitions and the results from the reasoner instances are combined. If data is changed, an inference library resulting from the combined results may be updated by updating only those portions of the inference library affected by the changed data.