Graph-Based Ontology Checking

Lam, Sik Chun (Joey) and Sleeman, Derek and Vasconcelos, Wanberto (2005) Graph-Based Ontology Checking. In Proceedings KCAP05 workshop on Ontology Management: Searching, Selection, Ranking and Segmentation, pages pp. 33-40, Banff, Canada.

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Despite the growing availability of ontologies, the reuse of existing ontologies is often not possible without con- siderable effort. When one wants to reuse an ontology by importing it into ontology editors, the import process is not always successful due to an ill-formed content. Many existing ontology editors provide consistency detection by connecting to a reasoner, and highlighting the inconsistencies. However, no explanation nor functionalities are provided for users to correct the problems. In this paper we introduce a graph-based approach to checking ontology inconsistencies, implemented in our tool, ReTAX++. The system not only highlights the inconsistencies in an ontology by interacting with a reasoner, but also provides facilities for users to resolve the problems. By formalising an ontology as a graph, we check which relationships of the inconsistent concepts may cause the contradiction, and a number of options to resolve the problems are provided. Currently, we only focus on disjointedness and complement contradictions.

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