Two applications of concept refinement

We describe two applications of refinement operators that can generalise and specialise concepts expressed in the ALC description logic language. The first application addresses the problem of analysing the joint coherence of some given concepts w.r.t. a background ontology. To this end, we apply Thagard's computational theory of coherence, in combination with semantic similarity between concepts defined by means of the generalisation operator. The second application focuses on repairing an inconsistent collective ontology that may result from the vote on axioms of multiple experts based on principles from social choice theory and judgment aggregation. We use the refinement operators, together with a reference ontology, to weaken some axioms and to repair the collective ontology