Debugging the missing is-a structure of networked ontologies

Abstract

In parallel with the proliferation of ontologies and their use in semantically-enabled applications, the issue of finding and dealing with defects in ontologies has become increasingly important. Current work mostly targets detecting and repairing semantic defects in ontologies. In our work, we focus on another kind of severe defects, modeling defects, which require domain knowledge to detect and resolve. In particular, we are interested in detecting and repairing the missing structural relations (is-a hierarchy) in the ontologies. Our goal is to develop a system, which allows a domain expert to detect and repair the structure of ontologies in a semi-automatic way. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.