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Extracting a justification for OWL ontologies by critical axioms

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Abstract

Extracting justifications for web ontology language (OWL) ontologies is an important mission in ontology engineering. In this paper, we focus on black-box techniques which are based on ontology reasoners. Through creating a recursive expansion procedure, all elements which are called critical axioms in the justification are explored one by one. In this detection procedure, an axiom selection function is used to avoid testing irrelevant axioms. In addition, an incremental reasoning procedure has been proposed in order to substitute series of standard reasoning tests w.r.t. satisfiability. It is implemented by employing a pseudo model to detect “obvious” satisfiability directly. The experimental results show that our proposed strategy for extracting justifications for OWL ontologies by adopting incremental expansion is superior to traditional Black-box methods in terms of efficiency and performance.

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Acknowledgements

Research presented in this paper was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61672261, 61502199). It’s also funded by China Scholarship Council (201506175028) for the first author of this paper. We would like to be grateful to the partners in the laboratory who have given our generous support and helpful advice for this study. Specially, thanks are due to Assistant Professor Jiafeng Xie for assistance with the experiments and proofreading the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China

    Yuxin Ye & Dantong Ouyang

  2. Key Lab of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering (Jilin University), Ministry of Education, Changchun, 130012, China

    Yuxin Ye, Xianji Cui & Dantong Ouyang

  3. College of Information and Communication Engineering, Dalian Minzu University, Dalian, 116600, China

    Xianji Cui

Authors
  1. Yuxin Ye
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  2. Xianji Cui
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  3. Dantong Ouyang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dantong Ouyang.

Additional information

Yuxin Ye received his PhD degree in computer software and theory from Jilin University, China in 2010. He is currently an associate professor in the College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, China. He also serves on Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering (Jilin University), Ministry of Education, China. He has more than 10 years of experience in Ontology Engineering and Semantic Web research and has more than 40 publications in these areas. He is a Member of China Computer Federation (CCF). His main research interests include semantic Web, ontology engineering, and knowledge graph.

Xianji Cui received her PhD degree in computer software and theory from Jilin University, China in 2014. She is currently a lecture in College of Information and Communication Engineering, Dalian Minzu University, China. Her main research interests include semantic Web and ontology engineering.

Dantong Ouyang received her PhD degree in computer software and theory from Jilin University, China in 1998. She is currently a professor and PhD supervisor in the College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, China. She is a senior member of China Computer Federation (CCF). She also serves on some academic organizations, such as CCF TCAIPR, CCF TTCS, CAAI KE&DS, and so on. Her main research interests include artificial intelligence, automatic reasoning, model based diagnosis, constraint problem, and so on.

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Ye, Y., Cui, X. & Ouyang, D. Extracting a justification for OWL ontologies by critical axioms. Front. Comput. Sci. 14, 144305 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-019-7267-5

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