Detecting and revising flaws in OWL object property expressions

Abstract

OWL 2 DL is a very expressive language and has many features for declaring complex object property expressions. Standard reasoning services for OWL ontologies assume the axioms in the "object property box" to be correct and according to the ontologist's intention. However, the more one can do, the higher the chance modelling flaws are introduced; hence, an unexpected or undesired classification or inconsistency may actually be due to a mistake in the object property box, not the class axioms. We identify the types of flaws that can occur in the object property box and propose corresponding compatibility services, SubProS and ProChainS, that check for meaningful property hierarchies and property chaining and propose how to revise a flaw. SubProS and ProChainS were evaluated with several ontologies, demonstrating they indeed do serve to isolate flaws and can propose useful corrections.