A New Approach of Reasoning with Inconsistent Ontologies

Reasoning with inconsistent ontologies is to use an inconsistency reasoner to get meaningful answers from inconsistent ontologies. In this paper, we propose an improved inconsistency reasoner which selects some consistent subsets by using minimal inconsistent sets(MIS) and a resolution method to improve the run-time performance of the reasoning processing. A minimal inconsistent set contains a minimal explanation for the inconsistency of an ontology. Thus, it can replace the consistency checking operation, which is executed frequently in the existing approaches. When selecting subsets of the inconsistent ontology, we select formulas which can be directly or indirectly resolved with the negation of the query formula, because only those formulas have effects on the consequences of the reasoner. In this paper, we prove that the complexity of the reasoning processing is reduced a lot. Furthermore, the experimental results show that the run-time performance of the inconsistency reasoner has been significantly improved.