Resolving inconsistencies in evolving ontologies

Abstract

Changing a consistent ontology may turn the ontology into an inconsistent state. It is the task of an approach supporting ontology evolution to ensure an ontology evolves from one consistent state into another consistent state. In this paper, we focus on checking consistency of OWL DL ontologies. While existing reasoners allow detecting inconsistencies, determining why the ontology is inconsistent and offering solutions for these inconsistencies is far from trivial. We therefore propose an algorithm to select the axioms from an ontology causing the inconsistency, as well as a set of rules that ontology engineers can use to resolve the detected inconsistency. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.