Towards Practical ABox Abduction in Large Description Logic Ontologies

  • Authors:

  • Jeff Z. Pan;Jianfeng Du;Guilin Qi;Yi-Dong Shen

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Aberdeen, UK;Guangdong University of Foreign Studies & State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China;Southeast University & Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin University, China;State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

  • Venue:
  • International Journal on Semantic Web & Information Systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

ABox abduction is an important reasoning facility in Description Logics DLs. It finds all minimal sets of ABox axioms, called abductive solutions, which should be added to a background ontology to enforce entailment of an observation which is a specified set of ABox axioms. However, ABox abduction is far from practical by now because there lack feasible methods working in finite time for expressive DLs. To pave a way to practical ABox abduction, this paper proposes a new problem for ABox abduction and a new method for computing abductive solutions accordingly. The proposed problem guarantees finite number of abductive solutions. The proposed method works in finite time for a very expressive DL,, which underpins the W3C standard language OWL 2, and guarantees soundness and conditional completeness of computed results. Experimental results on benchmark ontologies show that the method is feasible and can scale to large ABoxes.