Debugging OWL-DL ontologies: a heuristic approach

  • Authors:

  • Hai Wang;Matthew Horridge;Alan Rector;Nick Drummond;Julian Seidenberg

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK;Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK;Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK;Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK;Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

  • Venue:
  • ISWC'05 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on The Semantic Web
  • Year:
  • 2005

  • The FaCT System

    TABLEAUX '98 Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Reasoning with Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods

  • RACER System Description

    IJCAR '01 Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning

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Abstract

After becoming a W3C Recommendation, OWL is becoming increasingly widely accepted and used. However most people still find it difficult to create and use OWL ontologies. On major difficulty is “debugging” the ontologies – discovering why a reasoners has inferred that a class is “unsatisfiable” (inconsistent). Even for people who do understand OWL and the logical meaning of the underlining description logic, discovering why concepts are unsatisfiable can be difficult. Most modern tableaux reasoners do not provide any explanation as to why the classes are unsatisfiable. This paper presents a ‘black boxed' heuristic approach based on identifying common errors and inferences.