A Practical Fine-grained Approach to Resolving Incoherent OWL 2 DL Terminologies

Resolving incoherent terminologies is an important task in the maintenance of evolving OWL 2 DL ontologies. Existing approaches to this task are either semi-automatic or based on simple deletion of axioms. There is a need of fine-grained approaches to automatize this task. Since a fine-grained approach should consider multiple choices for modifying an axiom other than the deletion of axioms only, the primary challenges for developing such an approach lie in both the semantics of the repaired results and the efficiency in computing the repaired results. To tackle these challenges, we first introduce the notion of fine-grained repair based on modifying one axiom to zero or more axioms, then propose an efficient incremental method for computing all fine-grained repairs one by one. We also propose a modification function for axioms expressed in OWL 2 DL, which returns weaker axioms. Based on this modification function and the method for computing fine-grained repairs, we develop an automatic approach to resolving incoherent OWL 2 DL terminologies. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is efficient and practical.