Inconsistent Ontology Research Articles

The Social Solidarity Economy and the Hull-House Tradition of Social Work: Keys for Unlocking the Potential of Social Work for Sustainable Social Development

Social work (SW) is criticized for its (i) inconsistent ontology, epistemology, and methodology and (ii) co-dependency with the capitalist hegemony, which is the main cause of multiple crises that primarily affect the most vulnerable. Addressing these issues is of paramount importance if SW is to achieve its core mandate of promoting social change, social development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people. The purpose of this paper is to assert that SW can address these issues by learning from the (i) Settlement House Movement (SHM), especially the Hull-House tradition of SW; and (ii) current endeavors of the Social Solidarity Economy (SSE). We were led to this assertion because we noticed in our research, in the area of SSE of vulnerable groups and SW, remarkable similarities and potentials of these two approaches to help transform SW. Our argument is based on data and insight gained from (i) a narrative literature review on the history of SW and the nature of SSE; and (ii) a systematic scoping review of the SSE of People of African Descent (PAD) in Europe. In this paper, we elaborate on our key arguments and provide examples and recommendations.

Repairing Ontologies via Axiom Weakening

Ontology engineering is a hard and error-prone task, in which small changes may lead to errors, or even produce an inconsistent ontology. As ontologies grow in size, the need for automated methods for repairing inconsistencies while preserving as much of the original knowledge as possible increases. Most previous approaches to this task are based on removing a few axioms from the ontology to regain consistency. We propose a new method based on weakening these axioms to make them less restrictive, employing the use of refinement operators. We introduce the theoretical framework for weakening DL ontologies, propose algorithms to repair ontologies based on the framework, and provide an analysis of the computational complexity. Through an empirical analysis made over real-life ontologies, we show that our approach preserves significantly more of the original knowledge of the ontology than removing axioms.

An Approach to Detect Conflicts for Collaborative Evolution of Medicine Ontogoly

In the collaborative evolution of biomedical ontology, participants are a sizeable, balanced mix of scholars and physicians, all of whom are experienced in the biomedical domain and who represent diverse viewpoints, experiences, and backgrounds. In the field of collaborative evolution of biomedical ontology on large-scale ontology, there exists inevitable conflicts, which may cause the inconsistent ontology. In this paper, a new method to detect conflicts in ontology evolution is presented, which classifies conflicts as three groups: internal inconsistencies conflicts in change sequence, direct conflicts between the sequences and Inconsistent conflict between the sequences. For different conflict, high effective detecting algorithms are presented with evaluation. Before the conflicts detecting, semantic extended rules are employed to depict the evolution requirements of the participants. In particular, we discuss the situation where maximum consistent changing subsequence is needed if there are inconsistent conflicts between changing subsequences. We also show how detecting algorithms could be taken in the collaborative evolution of medicine ontology. As a result, internal and mutual inconsistencies can be detected from change sequences. And if there are conflicts between the sequences, the algorithm will provide the maximum consistent changing subsequence as the evolution basis. The designed experiments verify our approach and achieve the expected results.

Paraconsistent query answering over DL-Lite ontologies

Consistent query answering over description logic based ontologies is an important topic in ontology engineering as it can provide meaningful answers to queries posed over inconsistent ontologies. Current approaches for dealing with this problem usually consist of two steps: the first one is to extract some consistent sub-ontologies of an inconsistent ontology, and then the second one is to pose the query over these consistent sub-ontologies. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to consistent query answering for conjunctive queries over DL-Lite ontologies based on four-valued semantics, where DL-Lite is a family of tractable Description Logics DLs. We give an algorithm to compute answers to a query over an inconsistent DL-Lite ontology and show that it is tractable. In particular, we show that it is in PTime with respect to the size of the TBox, and is LOGSPACE with respect to the size of the ABox.

Reasoning with Inconsistent Ontologies

Reasoning with inconsistent ontologies involves using an inconsistency reasoner to get meaningful answers from inconsistent ontologies. This paper introduces an improved inconsistency reasoner, which selects consistent subsets using minimal inconsistent sets and a resolution method, to improve the run-time performance of the reasoning processing. A minimal inconsistent set contains a minimal explanation for the inconsistency of a given ontology. Thus, it can replace the consistency checking operation, which is executed frequently in existing approaches. When selecting subsets of the inconsistent ontology, formulas which can be directly or indirectly resolved with the negation of the query formula are selected because only those formulas affect the consequences of the reasoner. Therefore, the complexity of the reasoning processing is significantly reduced. Tests show that the run-time performance of the inconsistency reasoner is significantly improved.

Inconsistent ontology revision based on ontology constructs

Assessing the quality of ontologies is important to reuse/integrate ontologies. In this paper, we propose an approach to revise ontology inconsistency by measuring the relevant ontology constructs such as semantic partitions, axiom fanouts per concept, minimal incoherence-preserving subsets, incoherence impact value per axiom and preferable revision weight per concept in the ontology being measured. We also propose several algorithms to compute the measurement values of these ontology constructs, which can be used to pinpoint and rank which axioms and concepts are most likely to cause the ontology inconsistency. Our approach can help determine which concepts should be preferentially modified and therefore enables automatic revision of ontology inconsistency in the context of a dynamic and evolving environment.

REASONING WITH INCONSISTENT ONTOLOGIES THROUGH ARGUMENTATION

Standard approaches to reasoning with description logics (DL) ontologies require them to be consistent. However, as ontologies are complex entities and sometimes built upon other imported ontologies, inconsistencies can arise. In this article, we present δ-ontologies, a framework for reasoning with inconsistent DL ontologies. Our proposal involves expressing DL ontologies as defeasible logic programs (DeLP). Given a query posed w.r.t. an inconsistent ontology, a dialectical analysis will be performed on a DeLP program obtained from such an ontology, where all arguments in favor and against the final answer of the query will be taken into account. We also present an application to ontology integration based on the global-as-view approach.

A knowledge encapsulation approach to ontology modularization

The development of monolithic ontologies for complex domains may face various challenges in reasoning and implementation. The notion of modularity can be employed for developing more efficient ontologies, especially in distributed environments. In this paper, we introduce a framework for developing ontologies in a modular manner. We describe the interface-based modular ontology formalism, (IBF), which theoretically supports the framework. The main feature of the framework is its support for knowledge encapsulation, i.e., it allows ontologies to define their main content using well-defined interfaces, such that their knowledge bases can only be accessed by other ontologies through these interfaces. An important implication of the proposed framework is that ontology modules can be developed completely independent of each other’s signature and languages. Such modules are free to only utilize the required knowledge segments of the others. We also investigate the issues of inconsistency in the proposed modular ontology framework. We provide solutions for isolating inconsistent ontology modules from the other parts of a modular ontology and also resolve inconsistencies which may be arisen by integrating consistent knowledge bases.

Inconsistent Ontology Handling by Translating Description Logics into Defeasible Logic Programming

The Semantic Web is a future vision of the web where stored information has exact meaning, thus enabling computers to understand and reason on the basis of such information. Assigning semantics to web resources is addressed by means of ontology definitions which are meant to be written in an ontology description language such as OWL-DL that is based on so-called Description Logics (DL). Although ontology definitions expressed in DL can be processed with existing DL reasoners, such DL reasoners are incapable of dealing with inconsistent ontology definitions. Previous research has determined that a subset of DL can be eectively translated into an equivalent subset of logic programming. We propose a method for dealing with inconsistent ontology definitions in the Semantic Web. Our proposal involves mapping DL ontologies into DeLP programs. That is, given an OWL-DL ontologyOOwl, an equivalent DL ontologyODL can be obtained. ProvidedODL satisfies certain restrictions, it can be translated into a DeLP program ODeLP. Therefore, given a query Q w.r.t. OOwl, a dialectical process will be performed to determine if Q is warranted w.r.t.ODeLP.