Preventing, Detecting, and Revising Flaws in Object Property Expressions
The OWL 2 DL ontology language is very expressive and has many features for declaring complex object property expressions. Standard reasoning services for OWL ontologies take these expressions as correct and according to the ontologists intention. However, the more one can do, the higher the chance that modelling flaws are introduced; hence, an unexpected or undesired classification or inconsistency in the class hierarchy may actually be due to a mistake in the object property box, not the class axioms. We analyse the principles of subsumption in object property hierarchies and use it to identify the types of flaws that can occur in object property expressions. We propose the compatibility services SubProSand ProChainSthat check for meaningful property hierarchies and property chaining and propose how to revise a flaw. These insights can also be used to prevent flaws and to choose the best option, which we demonstrate with the chain pattern for upward and downward distributivity over parthood relations. SubProSand ProChainSwere evaluated with several ontologies, which demonstrates that such flaws do exist and can be isolated effectively, and useful suggestions for revisions can be proposed.
owl property hierarchy property chains role inclusion axioms ontology quality