A Decomposition-Based Approach to OWL DL Ontology Diagnosis

Computing all diagnoses of an inconsistent ontology is important in ontology-based applications. However, the number of diagnoses can be very large. It is impractical to enumerate all diagnoses before identifying the target one to render the ontology consistent. Hence, we propose to represent all diagnoses by multiple sets of partial diagnoses, where the total number of partial diagnoses can be small and the target diagnosis can be directly retrieved from these partial diagnoses. We also propose methods for computing the new representation of all diagnoses in an OWL DL ontology. Experimental results show that computing the new representation of all diagnoses is much easier than directly computing all diagnoses.