Ontology engineering is a hard and error-prone task, in which small changes may lead to errors, or even produce an inconsistent ontology. As ontologies grow in size, the need for automated methods for repairing inconsistencies while preserving as much of the original knowledge as possible increases. Most previous approaches to this task are based on removing a few axioms from the ontology to regain consistency. We propose a new method based on weakening these axioms to make them less restrictive, employing the use of refinement operators. We introduce the theoretical framework for weakening DL ontologies, propose algorithms to repair ontologies based on the framework, and provide an analysis of the computational complexity. Through an empirical analysis made over real-life ontologies, we show that our approach preserves significantly more of the original knowledge of the ontology than removing axioms.
We leave to future work the evaluation of our approach in comparison to other state-of-the-art ontology repair frameworks. As already stated, this is not an entirely well-posed problem; but if, as in this work, we accept that a suggested repair @math is preferable to another suggested repair @math whenever @math then the question becomes amenable to analysis. Possibly, complementary metrics for further evaluations can be chosen from @cite_29 . Experiments involving user evaluation could be also considered in this context.
@cite_29
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Software bugs remain a compelling problem. Automated program repair is a promising approach for reducing cost, and many methods have recently demonstrated positive results. However, success on any particular bug is variable, as is the cost to find a repair. This paper focuses on generate-and-validate repair methods that enumerate candidate repairs and use test cases to define correct behavior. We formalize repair cost in terms of test executions, which dominate most test-based repair algorithms. Insights from this model lead to a novel deterministic repair algorithm that computes a patch quotient space with respect to an approximate semantic equivalence relation. This allows syntactic and dataflow analysis techniques to dramatically reduce the repair search space. Generate-and-validate program repair is shown to be a dual of mutation testing, suggesting several possible cross-fertilizations. Evaluating on 105 real-world bugs in programs totaling 5MLOC and involving 10,000 tests, our new algorithm requires an order-of-magnitude fewer test evaluations than the previous state-of-the-art and is over three times more efficient monetarily.