A general diagnosis method for ontologies

Abstract

The effective debugging of ontologies is an important prerequisite for their successful application and impact on the semantic web. The heart of this debugging process is the diagnosis of faulty knowledge bases. In this paper we define general concepts for the diagnosis of ontologies. Based on these concepts, we provide correct and complete algorithms for the computation of minimal diagnoses of knowledge bases. These concepts and algorithms are broadly applicable since they are independent of a particular variant of an underlying logic (with monotonic semantics) and independent of a particular reasoning system. The practical feasibility of our method is shown by extensive test evaluations. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.