Towards ensuring Satisfiability of Merged Ontology

The last decade has seen researchers developing efficient algorithms for the mapping and merging of ontologies to meet the demands of interoperability between heterogeneous and distributed information systems. But, still state-of-the-art ontology mapping and merging systems is semi-automatic that reduces the burden of manual creation and maintenance of mappings, and need human intervention for their validation. The contribution presented in this paper makes human intervention one step more down by automatically identifying semantic inconsistencies in the early stages of ontology merging. Our methodology detects inconsistencies based on structural mismatches that occur due to conflicts among the set of Generalized Concept Inclusions, and Disjoint Relations due to the differences between disjoint partitions in the local heterogeneous ontologies. We present novel methodologies to detect and repair semantic inconsistencies from the list of initial mappings. This results in global merged ontology free from ‘circulatory error in class/property hierarchy’, ‘common class/instance between disjoint classes error’, ‘redundancy of subclass/subproperty relations’, ‘redundancy of disjoint relations’ and other types of ‘semantic inconsistency’ errors. In this way, our methodology saves time and cost of traversing local ontologies for the validation of mappings, improves performance by producing only consistent accurate mappings, and reduces the user dependability for ensuring the satisfiability and consistency of merged ontology. The experiments show that the newer approach with automatic inconsistency detection yields a significantly higher precision.