Completing and Debugging Ontologies: State-of-the-art and Challenges in Repairing Ontologies

Abstract

As semantically enabled applications require high-quality ontologies, developing and maintaining ontologies that are as correct and complete as possible is an important although difficult task in ontology engineering. A key task is ontology debugging and completion. In general, there are two steps: detecting defects and repairing defects. In this article, we discuss the state-of-the-art regarding the repairing step. We do this by formalizing the repairing step as an abductive reasoning problem and situating the state-of-the-art with respect to this framework. We show that there are still many open research problems and show opportunities for further work and advancing the field.