Paper Info
Title
The logical diversity of explanations in OWL ontologies
Abstract
Given the high expressivity of the Web Ontology Language OWL 2, there is a potential for great diversity in the logical content of OWL ontologies. The fact that many naturally occurring entailments of such ontologies have multiple justifications indicates that ontologies often overdetermine their consequences, suggesting a diversity in supporting reasons. On closer inspection, however, we often find that justifications---even for multiple entailments---appear to be structurally similar, suggesting that their multiplicity might be due to diverse material, not formal grounds for an entailment. In this paper, we introduce and explore several equivalence relations over justifications for entailments of OWL ontologies which partition a set of justifications into structurally similar subsets. These equivalence relations range from strict isomorphism to looser notions of similarity, covering justifications which contain different class expressions, or even different numbers of axioms. We present the results of a survey of 78 ontologies from the biomedical domain which shows that OWL ontologies used in practice often contain large numbers of structurally similar justifications. We find that a large justification corpus can be reduced by 97% of its original size to a small core of frequently occurring justification templates.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2505515.2505536
CIKM
Keywords
Field
DocType
web ontology language owl,logical diversity,similar justification,different class expression,equivalence relation,justification template,great diversity,large justification corpus,owl ontology,similar subsets,different number,ontologies,owl,debugging,semantic web,bioinformatics
Ontology (information science),Data mining,Logical consequence,Equivalence relation,Information retrieval,Expression (mathematics),Computer science,Axiom,Semantic Web,Web Ontology Language,Ontology language
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.37
6
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Samantha Bail11068.03
Bijan Parsia26146429.53
Ulrike Sattler36177478.47