Using Patterns to Explain Inferences in

Abstract

With the increasing number of applications of Description Logics (DLs), unsatisfiable concepts and inconsistent knowledge bases become quite common, especially when the knowledge bases are large and complex. This makes it challenging, even for experienced knowledge engineers, to identify and resolve these unsatisfiabilities and inconsistencies manually. It is thus crucial to provide services to explain how and why a result is derived. Motivated by the possibility of applying resolution technique in first‐order logic to construct explanations for DLs, we present an algorithm that uses patterns to generate explanations for unsatisfiability and inconsistency reasoning in , obtained by extending our previous work on . The use of resolution proofs to provide explanations for DL reasoners is due to their focus which, through literals involved in the process, contributes directly to the contradiction, hence acting as filters to discard irrelevant information. We also establish the soundness and completeness of the algorithm. The proposed solution approach is independent of the underlying DL reasoners, which suggests its potential application for any DL framework.