Reasoning With Inconsistent Ontologies: Framework, Prototype, and Experiment

Abstract

Classical logical inference engines assume the consistency of the ontologies they reason with. Conclusions drawn from an inconsistent ontology by classical inference may be completely meaningless. An inconsistency reasoner is one which is able to return meaningful answers to queries, given an inconsistent ontology. In this chapter, we propose a general framework for reasoning with inconsistent ontologies. We present the formal definitions of soundness, meaningfulness, local completeness, and maximality of an inconsistency reasoner. We propose and investigate a pre-processing algorithm, discuss the strategies of inconsistency reasoning based on pre-defined selection functions dealing with concept relevance. We have implemented a system called PION (Processing Inconsistent ONtologies) for reasoning with inconsistent ontologies. We discuss how the syntactic relevance can be used for PION. In this chapter, we also report the preliminary experiments with PION.