Repairing Ontologies via Axiom Weakening

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for repairing inconsistent ontologies by weakening axioms using refinement operators, which better preserves original knowledge compared to traditional axiom removal methods.

Contribution

It presents a new theoretical framework and algorithms for ontology repair via axiom weakening, along with complexity analysis and empirical validation.

Findings

Preserves more original knowledge than axiom removal methods.

Effective on real-life ontologies.

Provides a computational complexity analysis.

Abstract

Ontology engineering is a hard and error-prone task, in which small changes may lead to errors, or even produce an inconsistent ontology. As ontologies grow in size, the need for automated methods for repairing inconsistencies while preserving as much of the original knowledge as possible increases. Most previous approaches to this task are based on removing a few axioms from the ontology to regain consistency. We propose a new method based on weakening these axioms to make them less restrictive, employing the use of refinement operators. We introduce the theoretical framework for weakening DL ontologies, propose algorithms to repair ontologies based on the framework, and provide an analysis of the computational complexity. Through an empirical analysis made over real-life ontologies, we show that our approach preserves significantly more of the original knowledge of the ontology than removing axioms.