Abstract
The ability to deal with inconsistencies and to evaluate the impact of possible solutions for resolving inconsistencies are of the utmost importance in real world ontology applications. The common approaches either identify the minimally unsatisfiable sub-ontologies or the maximally satisfiable sub-ontologies. However there is little work which addresses the issue of rewriting the ontology; it is not clear which axioms or which parts of axioms should be repaired, nor how to repair those axioms. In this paper, we address these limitations by proposing an approach to resolving unsatisfiable ontologies which is fine-grained in the sense that it allows parts of axioms to be changed. We revise the axiom tracing technique first proposed by Baader and Hollunder, so as to track which parts of the problematic axioms cause the unsatisfiability. Moreover, we have developed a tool to support the ontology user in rewriting problematic axioms. In order to minimise the impact of changes and prevent unintended entailment loss, both harmful and helpful changes are identified and reported to the user. Finally we present an evaluation of our interactive debugging tool and demonstrate its applicability in practice.
This paper is an extended version of [Joey SC Lam et al., A Fine-grained Approach to Resolving Unsatisfiable Ontologies, In Proc. of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI-2006)]. We extend our previous work to handle general concept inclusions and cyclic definitions. This work is supported by the AKT Project (the EPSRC’s grant number GR/N15764).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Baader, F., Calvanese, D., McGuinness, D.L., Nardi, D., Patel-Schneider, P.: The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation and Applications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)
Baader, F., Nutt, W.: Basic description logics. The Description Logic Handbook: Therory, Implementation, and Applications
Baader, F., Buchheit, M., Hollunder, B.: Cardinality restrictions on concepts. Artif. Intell. 88(1-2), 195–213 (1996)
Baader, F., Hollunder, B.: Embedding defaults into terminological knowledge representation formalisms. J. Autom. Reasoning 14(1), 149–180 (1995)
Baader, F., Hollunder, B., Nebel, B., Profitlich, H.-J., Franconi, E.: An empirical analysis of optimization techniques for terminological representation systems or “making KRIS get a move on”. In: International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, San Mateo, pp. 270–281. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1992)
Brandt, S., Küsters, R., Turhan, A.-Y.: Approximation and difference in description logics. In: KR 2002. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, pp. 203–214. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2002)
Buchheit, M., Donini, F.M., Schaerf, A.: Decidable reasoning in terminological knowledge representation systems. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 1, 109–138 (1993)
De Giacomo, G., Lenzerini, M., Poggi, A., Rosati, R.: On the update of description logic ontologies at the instance level. In: Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1271–1276. AAAI Press, Stanford (2006)
Horrocks, I.: Optimising Tableaux Decision Procedures for Description Logics. PhD thesis, University of Manchester (1997)
Kalyanpur, A., Parsia, B., Grau, B.C., Sirin, E.: Justifications for entailments in expressive description logics. Technical report, University of Maryland (January 2006)
Kalyanpur, A.: Debugging and Repair of OWL Ontologies. PhD thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Maryland (2006)
Kalyanpur, A., Parsia, B., Cuenca-Grau, B.: Beyond asserted axioms: Fine-grain justifications for OWL-DL entailments. In: DL 2006. International Workshop on Description Logics (June 2006)
Kalyanpur, A., Parsia, B., Sirin, E., Cuenca-Grau, B.: Repairing Unsatisfiable Concepts in OWL Ontologies. In: ESWC 2006. Proceedings of the Third European Semantic Web Conference (June 2006)
Liu, H., Lutz, C., Milicic, M., Wolter, F.: Updating description logic ABoxes. In: KR. Proceedings of International Conference of Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, pp. 46–56 (June 2006)
Meyer, T., Lee, K., Booth, R., Pan, J.Z.: Finding maximally satisfiable terminologies for the description logic ALC. In: AAAI 2006. Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (July 2006)
Nebel, B.: Reasoning and Revision in Hybrid Representation Systems. Springer, Heidelberg (1990)
Plessers, P., De Troyer, O.: Resolving inconsistencies in evolving ontologies. In: Sure, Y., Domingue, J. (eds.) ESWC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4011, pp. 200–214. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Rector, A., Drummond, N., Horridge, M., Rogers, J., Knublauch, H., Stevens, R., Wang, H., Wroe, C.: OWL Pizzas: Practical experience of teaching OWL-DL: Common errors & common patterns. In: Motta, E., Shadbolt, N.R., Stutt, A., Gibbins, N. (eds.) EKAW 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3257, pp. 63–81. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Reiter, R.: A theory of diagnosis from first principles. Artificial Intelligence 32(1), 57–95 (1987)
Schaerf, A.: Reasoning With Individuals in Concept Languages. Data and Knowledge Engineering 13(2), 141–176 (1994)
Schlobach, S., Huang, Z., Cornet, R.: Inconsistent ontology diagnosis: Evaluation. SEKT Deliverable 3.6.2, University of Karlsruhe (January 2006)
Schlobach, S., Cornet, R.: Non-standard reasoning services for the debugging of description logic terminologies. In: IJCAI 2003. 8th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2003)
Schmidt-Schauß, M., Smolka, G.: Attributive concept descriptions with complements. Artifical Intelligence 48(1), 1–26 (1991)
Teege, G.: Making the difference: A subtraction operation for description logics. In: KR 1994. 4th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1994)
Uschold, M., Gruninger, M.: Ontologies: Principles, Methods and Applications. The Knowledge Engineering Review (1996)
Wang, H., Horridge, M., Rector, A., Drummond, N., Seidenberg, J.: Debugging OWL-DL Ontologies: A heuristic approach. In: Gil, Y., Motta, E., Benjamins, V.R., Musen, M.A. (eds.) ISWC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3729, pp. 745–757. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lam, J.S.C., Sleeman, D., Pan, J.Z., Vasconcelos, W. (2008). A Fine-Grained Approach to Resolving Unsatisfiable Ontologies. In: Spaccapietra, S. (eds) Journal on Data Semantics X. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4900. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77688-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77688-8_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-77687-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-77688-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)