Local Change in Ontologies with Atomic Decomposition

When debugging big ontologies, it can be convenient to isolate the problematic behaviour so that only the relevant part of the ontology will be analysed during the repair. Selecting relevant fragments from an ontology is exactly the subject of study in Ontology Modularisation, while the procedures to make proper changes to parts of logical knowledge bases are the central point of the theory of Local Change. Even though these areas are related by the notion of relevance, they still have not been used in conjunction. Moreover, while Ontology Modularisation approaches have been used in practice, the same did not occur with Local Change, despite its concise formalization and potential to improve the computational efficiency of change operations. Thus, in this work, we aim to devise a relevance metric using atomic decomposition, originated in the field of Ontology Modularisation, and embed it into the framework of Local Change. As a result, we give the first steps towards the construction of operations for localized change in description logic ontologies, which could be useful to make debugging procedures more feasible for both ontology designers and computer programs.