Repairing Unsatisfiable Concepts in OWL Ontologies.pdf

Repairing Unsatisfiable Concepts in OWL Ontologies 1 1 1 2 Aditya Kalyanpur , Bijan Parsia , Evren Sirin , Bernardo Cuenca-Grau 1 MINDLAB, University of Maryland, College Park, USA aditya@, bparsia@, evren@ 2 School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK bcg@cs.man.ac.uk Abstract. In this paper, we investigate the problem of repairing unsat- isfiable concepts in an OWL ontology in detail, keeping in mind the user perspective as much as possible. We focus on various aspects of the repair process – improving the explanation support to help the user understand the cause of error better, exploring various strategies to rank erroneous axioms (with motivating use cases for each strategy), automatically gen- erating repair plans that can be customized easily, and suggesting appro- priate axiom edits where possible to the user. Based on the techniques described, we present a preliminary version of an interactive ontology repair tool and demonstrate its applicability in practice. 1 Introduction Now that OWL is a W3C Recommendation, one can expect that a much wider community of users and developers will be exposed to the expressive description logic SHOIN (D) which is the basis of OWL-DL. As semantic descriptions in OWL ontologies become more complicated, ontology debugging becomes an ex- tremely hard task for users, especially for those with little or no experience in description-logic-based knowledge representation. In such cases, ontology debug- ging tools are needed to explain and pinpoint defects in ontological definitions. A common defect found in OWL Ontologies is unsatisfiable c