Evonne: Interactive Proof Visualization for Description Logics (System Description) -- Extended Version
This work addresses the need for better explanation tools in ontology maintenance for users working with large ontologies, but it is incremental as it builds on existing justification methods.
The authors tackled the problem of explaining description logic entailments by developing Evonne, an interactive system that visualizes proofs for ontologies in expressive description logics, and they evaluated the quality of generated proofs using real ontologies.
Explanations for description logic (DL) entailments provide important support for the maintenance of large ontologies. The "justifications" usually employed for this purpose in ontology editors pinpoint the parts of the ontology responsible for a given entailment. Proofs for entailments make the intermediate reasoning steps explicit, and thus explain how a consequence can actually be derived. We present an interactive system for exploring description logic proofs, called Evonne, which visualizes proofs of consequences for ontologies written in expressive DLs. We describe the methods used for computing those proofs, together with a feature called signature-based proof condensation. Moreover, we evaluate the quality of generated proofs using real ontologies.