Query Strategy for Sequential Ontology Debugging

Debugging is an important prerequisite for the wide-spread application of ontologies, especially in areas that rely upon everyday users to create and maintain knowledge bases, such as the Semantic Web. Most recent approaches use diagnosis methods to identify sources of inconsistency. However, in most debugging cases these methods return many alternative diagnoses, thus placing the burden of fault localization on the user. This paper demonstrates how the target diagnosis can be identified by performing a sequence of observations, that is, by querying an oracle about entailments of the target ontology. We exploit probabilities of typical user errors to formulate information theoretic concepts for query selection. Our evaluation showed that the suggested method reduces the number of required observations compared to myopic strategies.