Repairing $\mathcal{EL}$ Ontologies Using Weakening and Completing
This work addresses ontology quality issues for developers of ontology-based applications, but it is incremental as it builds on traditional debugging techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of repairing EL ontologies by introducing an interactive approach that uses axiom weakening and completing to avoid removing correct domain consequences, showing a trade-off between expert validation effort and ontology quality.
The quality of ontologies in terms of their correctness and completeness is crucial for developing high-quality ontology-based applications. Traditional debugging techniques repair ontologies by removing unwanted axioms, but may thereby remove consequences that are correct in the domain of the ontology. In this paper we propose an interactive approach to mitigate this for $\mathcal{EL}$ ontologies by axiom weakening and completing. We present algorithms for weakening and completing and present the first approach for repairing that takes into account removing, weakening and completing. We show different combination strategies, discuss the influence on the final ontologies and show experimental results. We show that previous work has only considered special cases and that there is a trade-off between the amount of validation work for a domain expert and the quality of the ontology in terms of correctness and completeness.