PROSE: A Plugin-Based Paraconsistent OWL Reasoner

Abstract

The study of paraconsistent reasoning with ontologies is especially important for the Semantic Web since knowledge is not always perfect within it. Quasi-classical semantics is proven to rationally draw more meaningful conclusions even from an inconsistent ontology with the stronger inference power of paraconsistent reasoning. In our previous work, we have conceived a quasi-classical framework called prose to provide rich paraconsistent reasoning services for OWL ontologies, whose architecture contains three parts: a classical OWL reasoner, a quasi-classical transformer, and OWL API connecting with them. This paper finally implements prose where quasi-classical transformer is bulit as a plugin for paraconsistent reasoning on classical reasoners. Additionally, we select three popular classical OWL reasoners (i.e., Pellet, HermiT, and FaCT++) and two typical kinds of reasoning services (i.e., QC-consistency checking and QC-classification) for users. As we excepted, prose does exactly enable current classical OWL reasoners to tolerate inconsistency in a simple and convenient way. Furthermore, we evaluate the three reasoners in three dimensions (class, property, individual) and, as a result, those results can amend the analysis of the three reasoners on inconsistent ontologies.