Repairing ontologies for incomplete reasoners

Abstract. The need for scalable query answering often forces Semantic Web applications to use incomplete OWL 2 reasoners, which in some cases fail to derive all answers to a query. This is clearly undesirable, and in some applications may even be unacceptable. To address this problem, we investigate the problem of ‘repairing ’ an ontology T —that is, computing an ontology R such that a reasoner that is incomplete for T becomes complete when used with T ∪R. We identify conditions on T and the reasoner that make this possible, present a practical algorithm for computing R, and present a preliminary evaluation which shows that, in some realistic cases, repairs are feasible to compute, reasonable in size, and do not significantly affect reasoner performance.