When one Logic is Not Enough: Integrating First-order Annotations in OWL Ontologies
This addresses the problem of interoperability and error detection in ontology development for researchers and practitioners in semantic web and knowledge representation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing OWL infrastructure.
The paper tackles the gap between OWL domain ontologies and FOL foundational ontologies by introducing Gavel, a tool for developing heterogeneous FOWL ontologies that integrate FOL annotations, enabling reasoning over combined axioms and detecting inconsistencies, such as in OBI and ChEBI, where it identified several errors.
In ontology development, there is a gap between domain ontologies which mostly use the web ontology language, OWL, and foundational ontologies written in first-order logic, FOL. To bridge this gap, we present Gavel, a tool that supports the development of heterogeneous 'FOWL' ontologies that extend OWL with FOL annotations, and is able to reason over the combined set of axioms. Since FOL annotations are stored in OWL annotations, FOWL ontologies remain compatible with the existing OWL infrastructure. We show that for the OWL domain ontology OBI, the stronger integration with its FOL top-level ontology BFO via our approach enables us to detect several inconsistencies. Furthermore, existing OWL ontologies can benefit from FOL annotations. We illustrate this with FOWL ontologies containing mereotopological axioms that enable new meaningful inferences. Finally, we show that even for large domain ontologies such as ChEBI, automatic reasoning with FOL annotations can be used to detect previously unnoticed errors in the classification.