How to Repair Inconsistency in OWL 2 DL Ontology Versions?

Abstract

Semantic modeling knowledge formalisms, such as ontologies, have to follow the continuous evolution and changes of knowledge. However, ontology changes should never affect its consistency. Ontology needs to remain in a consistent state along its whole engineering process. In the literature, most of approaches check/repair ontology inconsistencies in an a posteriori way. In this paper, an a priori inconsistency approach was proposed to generate consistent OWL 2 DL ontology versions. It relies on the OWL 2 DL change kits, which anticipate inconsistencies upon each change request on an ontology version. The proposed approach predicts potential inconsistencies, provides an a priori repair action and applies the required changes. Consistency rules were defined and used to check logical inconsistencies, but also syntactical invalidities and style issues. A protégé plugin was implemented to validate our approach.