Title: Reasoning%20with%20Inconsistent%20Ontologies
1Reasoning with Inconsistent Ontologies
Zhisheng Huang, Frank van Harmelen, and Annette
ten Teije Vrije University Amsterdam (IJCAI2005
paper)
2Outline of This Talk
- Inconsistency in the Semantic Web
- General Framework
- Strategies and Algorithms
- Implementation
- Tests and Evaluation
- Future work and Conclusion
3Inconsistency and the Semantic Web
- The Semantic Web is characterized by
- scalability,
- distribution, and
- multi-authorship
- All these may introduce inconsistencies.
4Ontologies will be inconsistent
- Because of
- mistreatment of defaults
- polysemy
- migration from another formalism
- integration of multiple sources
-
- (Semantic Web as a wake-up call for KR)
5Example Inconsistency by mistreatment of
default rules
- MadCow Ontology
- Cow ? Vegetarian
- MadCow ? Cow
- MadCow ? ? Eat.BrainofSheep
- Sheep ? Animal
- Vegetarian ? ? Eat. ? (Animal? PartofAnimal)
- Brain ? PartofAnimal
- ......
- theMadCow ?MadCow
- ...
6Example Inconsistency through imigration from
other formalism
- DICE Ontology
- Brain ? CentralNervousSystem
- Brain ? BodyPart
- CentralNervousSystem ? NervousSystem
- BodyPart ? ?NervousSystem
7 Inconsistency and Explosion
- The classical entailment is explosive P, P
Q Any formula is a logical consequence of a
contradiction. - The conclusions derived from an inconsistent
ontology using the standard reasoning may be
completely meaningless
8Two main approaches to deal with inconsistency
- Inconsistency Diagnosis and Repair
- Ontology Diagnosis(Schlobach and Cornet 2003)
- Reasoning with Inconsistency
- Paraconsistent logics
- Limited inference (Levesque 1989)
- Approximate reasoning(Schaerf and Cadoli 1995)
- Resource-bounded inferences(Marquis et al.2003)
- Belief revision on relevance (Chopra et al. 2000)
9 What an inconsistency reasoner is expected
- Given an inconsistent ontology, return meaningful
answers to queries. - General solution Use non-standard reasoning to
deal with inconsistency - ? ? the standard inference relations
- ? ?? nonstandard inference relations
10Reasoning with inconsistent ontologies Main Idea
- Starting from the query,
- select consistent sub-theory by using a
relevance-based selection function. - apply standard reasoning on the selected
sub-theory to find meaningful answers. - If it cannot give a satisfying answer, the
selection function would relax the relevance
degree to extend consistent sub-theory for
further reasoning.
11New formal notions are needed
- New notions
- Accepted
- Rejected
- Overdetermined
- Undetermined
- Soundness (only classically justified results)
- Meaningfulness (sound never overdetermined)sou
ndness
12Selection Functions
- Given an ontology T and a query ?, a selection
function s(T,?,k)returns a subset of the
ontology at each step kgt0.
13General framework
- Use selection function s(T,?,k),with s(T,?,k) ?
s(T,?,k1) - Start with k0 s(T,?,0) ? or s(T,?,0) ??
? - Increase k, untils(T,?,k) ? or s(T,?,k) ??
- Abort when
- undetermined at maximal k
- overdetermined at some k
14Inconsistency Reasoning Processing Linear
Extension
15Proposition Linear Extension
- Never over-determined
- May undetermined
- Always sound
- Always meaningful
- ...
16Direct Relevance and K Relevance
- Direct relevance (0-relevance).
- there is a common name in two formulas C(?) ?
C(?)?? ? R(?) ? R(?)?? ? I(?)? I(?)??. - K-relevance there exist formulas ?0, ?1,, ?k
such that ? and ?0, ?0 and ?1 , , ?k and
? are directly relevant.
17Relevance-based Selection Functions
- s(T,?,0)?
- s(T,?,1) ?? T ? is directly relevant to ?.
- s(T,?,k) ?? T ? is directly relevant to
s(T,?,k-1).
18PION Prototype
PION Processing Inconsistent ONtologies http//wa
sp.cs.vu.nl/sekt/pion
19Answer Evaluation
- Intended Answer (IA) PION answer Intuitive
Answer - Cautious Answer (CA) PION answer is
undetermined, but intuitive answer is
accepted or rejected. - Reckless Answer (RA) PION answer is accepted
or rejected, but intuitive answer is
undetermined. - Counter Intuitive Answer (CIA) PION answer is
accepted but intuitive answer is rejected,
or vice verse.
20Preliminary Tests with Syntactic-relevance
Selection Function
Ontology Queries IA CA RA CIA IA () ICR ()
Bird 50 50 0 0 0 100 100
Brain (DICE) 42 36 4 2 0 85.7 100
MarriedWoman 50 48 0 2 0 96 100
MadCow 254 236 16 0 2 92.9 99
21Observation
- Intended answers include many undetermined
answers. - Some counter-intuitive answers
- Reasonably good performance
22Intensive Tests on PION
- Evaluation and test on PION with several
realistic ontologies - Communication Ontology
- Transportation Ontology
- MadCow Ontology
- Each ontology has been tested by thousands of
queries with different selection functions.
23Conclusions
- we proposed a general framework for reasoning
with inconsistent ontologies - based on selecting ever increasing consistent
subsets - choice of selection function is crucial
- query-based selection functions are flexible to
find intended answers - simple syntactic selection works surprisingly
well
24Future Work
- understand better why simple selection functions
work so well - consider other selection functions(e.g. exploit
more the structure of the ontology) - Variants of strategies
- More tests on realistic ontologies
- Integrating with the diagnosis approach