Toward a systematic conflict resolution framework for ontologies.

Journal: Journal of biomedical semantics
PMID:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The ontology authoring step in ontology development involves having to make choices about what subject domain knowledge to include. This may concern sorting out ontological differences and making choices between conflicting axioms due to limitations in the logic or the subject domain semantics. Examples are dealing with different foundational ontologies in ontology alignment and OWL 2 DL's transitive object property versus a qualified cardinality constraint. Such conflicts have to be resolved somehow. However, only isolated and fragmented guidance for doing so is available, which therefore results in ad hoc decision-making that may not be the best choice or forgotten about later.

Authors

  • C Maria Keet
    Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, 18 University Avenue, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa. mkeet@cs.uct.ac.za.
  • Rolf Grütter
    Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Zürcherstrasse 111, Birmensdorf, CH-8903, Switzerland. rolf.gruetter@wsl.ch.