Measuring Incoherence in Description Logic-Based Ontologies

Guilin Qi, Anthony Hunter

Abstract: Ontologies play a core role in the success of the Semantic Web as they provide a shared vocabulary for different resources and applications. Developing an error-free ontology is a difficult task. A common kind of error for an ontology is logical contradiction or incoherence. In this paper, we propose some approaches to measuring incoherence in DL-based ontologies. These measures give an ontology engineer important information for maintaining and evaluating ontologies. We implement the proposed approaches using the KAON2 reasoner and provide some preliminary but encouraging empirical results.