Completing and Debugging Ontologies: State of the Art and Challenges in Repairing Ontologies

Abstract

As semantically-enabled applications require high-quality ontologies, developing and maintaining ontologies that are as correct and complete as possible is an important although difficult task in ontology engineering. A key task is ontology debugging and completion. In general, there are two steps: detecting defects and repairing defects. In this paper we discuss the state of the art regarding the repairing step. We do this by formalizing the repairing step as an abductive reasoning problem and situating the state of the art with respect to this framework. We show that there are still many open research problems and show opportunities for further work and advancing the field.