How to Contract Ontologies: Statement of Interest
Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Evgeny Kharlamov, Dmitriy Zheleznyakov · 2012
Abstract. The dynamic nature of knowledge development has motivated the formal study of ontology evolution problems. In this paper, we study ontology contraction—the problem of retracting information that is no longer considered to hold. Our prime interest is to focus on ontologies expressed in Description Logics DL-Lite and EL, which underpin the OWL 2 QL and OWL 2 EL profiles. Our goal is to understand how to compute contractions under different kinds of semantics. As we have already shown in [1, 2], ontology contraction is technically very challenging. 1 Importance of Ontology Contraction Ontologies written in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) [3] and its revision OWL 2 [4] are becoming increasingly important for a wide range of applications. The formal underpinning of OWL is based on Description Logics (DLs) – knowledge representation formalisms with well-understood computational properties [5]. A DL ontology K consists of a TBox T, describing general (i.e., schema-level) domain knowledge, and an ABox A, providing data about specific individuals.