Detection of Inconsistencies in Rules Due to Changes in Ontologies: Let’s Get Formal

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the impact of ontology changes on production rules, in the context of rule programs written over the entities of OWL ontologies. Then, ontology evolutions may make rules inconsistent with respect to the knowledge modeled by the ontology. To address this problem, we propose to combine two approaches: the syntactic approach of the $\mathcal{M}{\rm odel}$-$\mathcal{D}{\rm etect}$-$\mathcal{R}{\rm epair}$ (${\mathcal{MDR}}$) method, and a semantic approach based on a formal description of production rules and rule program inconsistencies. The present paper shows on simple use cases the expected benefits of such a combination, which relies on existing implementations.