Ontodebug: Interactive ontology debugging plug-in for protégé

Abstract

Applications of semantic systems require their users to design ontologies that correctly formalize knowledge about a domain. In many cases factors such as insufficient understanding of a knowledge representation language, problems concerning modeling techniques and granularity, or inability to foresee all implications of formulated axioms result in faulty ontologies. Debugging tools help to localize faults in ontologies by finding explanations of discrepancies between the actual ontology and the intended one. In this paper we present OntoDebug – a plug-in for the currently most popular open-source ontology editor Protégé – that implements an interactive approach to ontology debugging. Given a faulty ontology and a specification of requirements to the intended ontology, encoded as a set of test cases, our tool finds a set of faulty axioms explaining the problem. In case the user provides a set of test cases that does not allow for the computation of a unique explanation, OntoDebug is able to collect the missing information by asking the user a sequence of automatically generated questions.