Abstract
Ontologies reflect their creators’ view of the domain at hand and are thus subjective. For specific applications it may be necessary to combine several of these ontologies into a more comprehensive domain model by merging them. However, due to the subjective nature of the source ontologies, this can result in inconsistencies. Handling these inconsistencies is a challenging task even for modestly sized ontologies. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Subjective Logic based approach to cope with inconsistencies originating in the ontology merging process. We formulate subjective opinions about the inconsistency causing axioms based on several pieces of evidence such as provenance information and structural relevance by utilizing consensus and conditional deduction operators. This allows creating an environment that supports handling of these inconsistencies. It provides the necessary mechanisms to capture the subjective opinion of different communities represented by the input ontologies on the trustworthiness of each axiom in the merged ontology and identifies the least trustworthy axioms. It suggests remedies of the inconsistencies, e.g. deleting or rewriting axioms, to the user. Our experimental results show that with this approach it is possible to overcome the inconsistency problem in ontology merging and that the approach is feasible and effective.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
In this work, we consider input ontologies as agents. see Sect. 2.2 for the rationale.
- 3.
The term “concept” refers to the classes based on our given ontology definition. We keep the term here to be uniform with the unsatisfiable concept’s definition in literature reviews.
- 4.
This is an unsatisfiable class in which a contradiction found in the class definition does not depend on the unsatisfiability of another class in the ontology.
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In our prototype, the existence of an axiom in an input ontology is determined by searching their equivalent elements based on the given mapping assumptions \(\mathcal {M}\). This could be extended to more powerful logic-based approaches.
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\(\alpha \) and \(\beta \) parameters can be determined by the user.
- 7.
The justification set \(\mathcal {J}=\{\mathcal {J}_1,\mathcal {J}_2,...,\mathcal {J}_l\}\) is taken from the OWL-API explanation, which is already sorted by the axiom frequency in \(\mathcal {J}\).
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The axioms’ details are represented in the orange boxes in Fig. 3.
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Acknowledgments
S. Babalou is supported by a scholarship from German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). We thank Sirko Schindler, Jan Martin Keil and Frank Löffler for their feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.
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Babalou, S., König-Ries, B. (2019). A Subjective Logic Based Approach to Handling Inconsistencies in Ontology Merging. In: Panetto, H., Debruyne, C., Hepp, M., Lewis, D., Ardagna, C., Meersman, R. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2019 Conferences. OTM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11877. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33246-4_37
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