CADE - 21 The 21 st Conference on Automated Deduction

Appropriate representation is the key to successful reasoning. Hence, if intelligent agents are to cope with changing goals in a changing environment, they must be able to adapt their representations, i.e., to detect that a current representation is inadequate, to diagnose its shortcomings and to repair it. In this paper we address the most basic kind of representational shortcoming: inconsistency. We focus on how certain kinds of inconsistency can be repaired using a repair plan that we entitle Where’s My Stuff?. We apply this repair plan manually to four examples from the domain of Physics. In each case an inconsistent ontology is repaired into a consistent one. This extends the interest of the Disproving workshop beyond the “reparation of non-theorems” to the reparation of inconsistent ontologies. The Physics domain has the advantage that many faulty ontologies have been recorded by historians of science, together with the evidence that identified their faults and the ontological repairs that were proposed to mend them. These records provide plenty of data for developing and evaluating ontology repair plans.