A Fine-Grained Approach to Resolving Unsatisfiable Ontologies
Sik Chun Joey Lam, Jeff Z. Pan, Derek H. Sleeman, Wamberto Weber Vasconcelos · 2006
In the Semantic Web, inconsistencies in OWL on- tologies may easily occur. Existing approaches ei- ther identify the minimally unsatisfiable sub-ontologies or calculate the maximally satisfiable sub-ontologies. However practical problems remain; it is not clear which axioms or which parts of axioms should be se- lected for repair, and how to repair those axioms. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing a fine-grained approach to resolving unsatisfiable ontolo- gies. We revise the axiom tracing technique first pro- posed by Baader and Hollunder, so as to track which parts of the problematic axioms cause the unsatisfiabil- ity. Moreover, we support ontology users in rewriting problematic axioms. In order to minimise the impact of changes and prevent unintended entailment loss, harm- ful and helpful changes are identified and provided as guidelines. Based on the methods described we present a preliminary version of an interactive debugging tool and demonstrate its applicability in practice.