Repairing the Missing is-a Structure of Ontologies

Developing ontologies is not an easy task and often the resulting ontologies are not consistent or complete. Such ontologies, although often useful, also lead to problems when used in semantically-enabled applications. Wrong conclusions may be derived or valid conclusions may be missed. To deal with this problem we may want to repair the ontologies. Up to date most work has been performed on finding and repairing the semantic defects such as unsatisfiable concepts and inconsistent ontologies. In this paper we tackle the problem of repairing modeling defects and in particular, the repairing of structural relations (is-a hierarchy) in the ontologies. We study the case where missing is-a relations are given. We define the notion of a structural repair and develop algorithms to compute repairing actions that would allow deriving the missing is-a relations in the repaired ontology. Further, we define preferences between repairs. We also look at how we can use external knowledge to recommend repairing actions to a domain expert. Further, we discuss an implemented prototype and its use as well as an experiment using the ontologies of the Anatomy track of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative. This is a preprint of the paper published by Springer-Verlag: Lambrix P, Liu Q, Tan H, Repairing the missing is-a structure of ontologies, Proceedings of the 4th Asian Semantic Web Conference ASWC09, LNCS 5926, 7690, Shanghai, China, 2009. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-10871-6 6