A modularization-based approach to finding all justifications for OWL DL entailments

Abstract

Finding the justifications for an entailment (i.e., minimal sets of axioms responsible for it) is a prominent reasoning service in ontology engineering, as justifications facilitate important tasks like debugging inconsistencies or undesired subsumption. Though several algorithms for finding all justifications exist, issues concerning efficiency and scalability remain a challenge due to the sheer size of real-life ontologies. In this paper, we propose a novel method for finding all justifications in OWL DL ontologies by limiting the search space to smaller modules. To this end, we show that so-called locality-based modules cover all axioms in the justifications. We present empirical results that demonstrate an improvement of several orders of magnitude in efficiency and scalability of finding all justifications in OWL DL ontologies. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.