A Preventive Approach for Consistent OWL 2 DL Ontology Versions

Abstract

Knowledge is continually changing over time. As such, semantic modelling knowledge formalisms, such as ontologies, must follow this evolution and change accordingly. However, ontology changes should never affect consistency. An ontology needs to remain in a consistent state along the whole ontology engineering process. In the literature, most of the approaches check/repair ontology inconsistencies in an a posteriori manner. This costs time and resources. In this article, an inconsistency prevention approach is proposed. It relies on OWL 2 DL change kits, which anticipate inconsistencies upon each change request. The proposed approach predicts potential inconsistencies, provides an a priori repair action, and applies the required changes. Consistency rules are defined and used to check logical inconsistencies, but also syntactical invalidities or style issues. A protégé extension is implemented to validate the proposal.