Localizing and resolving inconsistency in ontology evolution

Abstract

An ontology captures domain knowledge and plays an essential role in Semantic Web applications. When domain knowledge changes, an ontology should adapt to changes by adding, editing or deleting its axioms. The big challenge of this process – called ontology evolution – is how to guarantee the consistent state of an ontology. If the ontology is inconsistent because new axioms are added, one will attempt to modify or delete some axioms from the existing ontology. This paper proposes a method to localize the set of axioms to be deleted for building a consistent ontology in ontology evolution.