An efficient approach to debugging ontologies based on patterns

Abstract

Ontology debugging helps users to understand the unsatisfiability of a concept in an ontology by finding minimal unsatisfiability-preserving sub-ontologies (MUPS) of the ontology for the concept. Although existing approaches have shown good performance for some real life ontologies, they are still inefficient to handle ontologies that have many MUPS for an unsatisfiable concept. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach to debugging ontologies based on a set of patterns. Patterns provide general information to explain unsatisfiability but are not dependent on a specific ontology. In this approach, we make use of a set of heuristic strategies and construct a directed graph w.r.t. the hierarchies where the depth-first search strategy can be used to search paths. The experiments show that our approach has gained a significant improvement over the state of the art and can find considerable number of MUPS. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.