Integrated Metamodeling and Diagnosis in OWL

Ontological metamodeling has a variety of applications yet only very restricted forms are supported by OWL 2 directly. We propose a novel encoding scheme enabling class-based metamodeling inside the domain ontology with full reasoning support through standard OWL 2 reasoning systems. We demonstrate the usefulness of our method by applying it to the OntoClean methodology. En passant, we address performance problems arising from the inconsistency diagnosis strategy originally proposed for OntoClean by introducing an alternative technique where sources of conflicts are indicated by means of marker predicates.