Debugging OWL-DL Ontologies: A Heuristic Approach

After becoming a W3C Recommendation, OWL is becoming increasingly widely accepted and used. However most people still find it difficult to create and use OWL ontologies. On major difficulty is “debugging” the ontologies discovering why a reasoners has inferred that a class is “unsatisfiable” (inconsistent). Even for people who do understand OWL and the logical meaning of the underlining description logic, discovering why concepts are unsatisfiable can be difficult. Most modern tableaux reasoners do not provide any explanation as to why the classes are unsatisfiable. This paper presents a ‘black boxed’ heuristic approach based on identifying common errors and inferences.