Evaluation of Ontologies and DL Reasoners

Ontology driven architecture has revolutionized the inference system by allowing interoperability and efficient reasoning between heterogeneous multivendors systems. Sound reasoning support is highly important for sound semantic web ontologies which can only be possible if state-of-the-art Description Logic Reasoners were capable enough to identify inconsistency and classify taxonomy in ontologies. We have discussed existing ontological errors and design anomalies, and provided a case study incorporating these errors. We have evaluated consistency, subsumption, and satisfiability of DL reasoners on the case study. Experiment with DL reasoners opens up number of issues that were not incorporated within their followed algorithms. Especially circulatory errors and various types of semantic inconsistency errors that may cause serious side effects need to be detected by DL reasoners for sound reasoning from ontologies. The evaluation of DL reasoners on Automobile ontology helps in updating the subsumption, satisfiability and consistency checking algorithms for OWL ontologies, especially the new constructs of OWL 1.1.