Overview and reflexion on OWL 2 DL ontology consistency rules

Abstract

Domain knowledge capture has always been a major interest for both humans and computer systems. Thus, semantic formalisms, such as ontologies, become necessary to hold, share and understand that knowledge. As the world is continually changing, ontology must be updated accordingly. However, ontology changes should never affect its consistency as ontology needs to remain in a consistent state along its lifecycle. To this end, ontology consistency rules are defined and used to check not only logical inconsistencies but also syntactical invalidities and style issues. They are adopted from a posteriori approaches and adapted to enable an a priori detection/fixing of ontology inconsistencies. This paper discusses ontology inconsistency issues and describes the different consistency rules adopted from the literature. Then, it proves their useful adaptation for an a priori inconsistency detection and fixing.