Ontology Repair Through Partial Meet Contraction

Raphael Cóbe, Renata Wassermann

Abstract: The process of building an ontology, be it from scratch or through reuse and combination of other ontologies, is known to be susceptible to modeling errors. Ontology debugging and repair techniques have attracted attention in the last decade due to the popularization of the use of ontologies written in OWL. Belief Change deals with the problem of removing or adding new information to a knowledge base in a consistent way. In this paper, we look at the belief change operation known as partial meet contraction as a construction for ontology repair. We propose heuristics to improve the performance of such operation and compare them to an existing implementation and approaches based on finding minimal justifications or explanations by means of experiments with automatically generated ontologies and real world ontologies from the BioPortal.