The Semantic Web

Contrastive reasoning is the reasoning with contrasts which are expressed as contrary conjunctions like the word ”but” in natural language. Contrastive answers are more informative for reasoning with inconsistent ontologies, as compared with the usual simple Boolean answer, i.e., either ”yes” or ”no”. In this paper, we propose a method of computing contrastive answers from inconsistent ontologies. The proposed approach has been implemented in the system CRION (Contrastive Reasoning with Inconsistent ONtologies) as a reasoning plug-in in the LarKC (Large Knowledge Collider) platform. We report several experiments in which we apply the CRION system to some realistic ontologies. This evaluation shows that contrastive reasoning is a useful extension to the existing approaches of reasoning with inconsistent ontologies.