Pattern-based OWL Ontology Debugging Guidelines

Abstract : Debugging inconsistent OWL ontologies is a tedious and time-consuming task where a combination of ontology engineers and domain experts is often required to understand whether the changes to be performed are actually dealing with formalisation errors or changing the intended meaning of the original knowledge model. Debugging services from existing ontology engineering tools and debugging strategies available in the literature aid in this task. However, in complex cases they are still far from providing adequate support to ontology developers, due to their lack of efficiency or precision when explaining the main causes for unsatisfiable classes, together with little support for proposing solutions for them. We claim that it is possible to provide additional support to ontology developers, based on the identification of common antipatterns and a debugging strategy, which can be combined with the use of existing tools in order to make this task more effective.