Inductive Learning of Disjointness Axioms

The tremendous amounts of linked data available on the web are a valuable resource for a variety of semantic applications. However, these applications often need to face the challenges posed by flawed or underspecified representations. The sheer size of these data sets, being one of their most appealing features, is at the same time a hurdle on the way towards more accurate data because this size and the dynamics of the data often hinder manual maintenance and quality assurance. Schemas or ontologies constraining, e.g., the possible instantiations of classes and properties, could facilitate the automated detection of undesired usage patterns or incorrect assertions, but only few knowledge repositories feature schema-level knowledge of sufficient expressivity. In this paper, we present several approaches to enriching learned or manually engineered ontologies with disjointness axioms, an important prerequisite for the applicability of logical approaches to knowledge base debugging. We describe the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and report on a detailed evaluation based on the DBpedia dataset.