Axiom-Pinpointing in Description Logics and Beyond

Building and mantaining large-scale ontologies is an error-prone task. It is thus not uncommon to find unwanted or unexpected consequences that follow implicitely from the restrictions in the ontology. To understand and correct these consequences, it is helpful to find the specific portions of the ontology that are responsible for them. Axiom-pinpointing is the task of finding minimal subontologies that entail a given consequence, also called MinAs. In this work we look at the task of computing all the MinAs by means of modified decision procedures. We first show that tableaux- and automata-based decision procedures can be transformed into pinpointing algorithms that output a (compact) representation of the set of all MinAs. We then explore the complexity of the problem