A fine-grained approach to resolving unsatisfiable ontologies

In the Semantic Web, inconsistencies in OWL ontologies may easily occur. Existing approaches either identify the minimally unsatisfiable sub-ontologies or calculate the maximally satisfiable sub-ontologies. However practical problems remain; it is not clear which axioms or which parts of axioms should be selected for repair, and how to repair those axioms. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing a fine-grained approach to resolving unsatisfiable ontologies. We revise the axiom tracing technique first proposed by Baader and Hollunder, so as to track which parts of the problematic axioms cause the unsatisfiability. Moreover, we support ontology users in rewriting problematic axioms. In order to minimise the impact of changes and prevent unintended entailment loss, harmful and helpful changes are identified and provided as guidelines. Based on the methods described we present a preliminary version of an interactive debugging tool and demonstrate its applicability in practice.