Repairing $\mathcal{EL}$ Ontologies Using Weakening and Completing

TL;DR

This paper introduces an interactive method for repairing $ ext{EL}$ ontologies through axiom weakening and completing, aiming to improve correctness and completeness while minimizing domain expert validation.

Contribution

It presents the first combined approach for ontology repair using weakening, completing, and removal, with algorithms and strategies evaluated experimentally.

Findings

Trade-off identified between validation effort and ontology quality.

Previous work only addressed special cases, not combined strategies.

Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract

The quality of ontologies in terms of their correctness and completeness is crucial for developing high-quality ontology-based applications. Traditional debugging techniques repair ontologies by removing unwanted axioms, but may thereby remove consequences that are correct in the domain of the ontology. In this paper we propose an interactive approach to mitigate this for $\mathcal{EL}$ ontologies by axiom weakening and completing. We present algorithms for weakening and completing and present the first approach for repairing that takes into account removing, weakening and completing. We show different combination strategies, discuss the influence on the final ontologies and show experimental results. We show that previous work has only considered special cases and that there is a trade-off between the amount of validation work for a domain expert and the quality of the ontology in terms of correctness and completeness.