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Use and reuse of an ontology requires prior ontology verification which encompasses, at least, proving that the ontology is internally consistent and consistent with representative datasets. First-order logic (FOL) model finders are among the only available tools to aid us in this undertaking, but proving consistency of FOL ontologies is theoretically intractable while also rarely succeeding in practice, with FOL model finders scaling even worse than FOL theorem provers. This issue is further exacerbated when verifying FOL ontologies against datasets, which requires constructing models with larger domain sizes. This paper presents a first systematic study of the general feasibility of SAT-based model finding with FOL ontologies. We use select spatial ontologies and carefully controlled synthetic datasets to identify key measures that determine the size and difficulty of the resulting SAT problems. We experimentally show that these measures are closely correlated with the runtimes of Vampire and Paradox, two state-of-the-art model finders. We propose a definition elimination technique and demonstrate that it can be a highly effective measure for reducing the problem size and improving the runtime and scalability of model finding.
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Automatically Extracting OWL Versions of FOL Ontologies
While OWL and RDF are by far the most popular logic-based languages for Semantic Web Ontologies, some well-designed ontologies are only available in languages with a much richer expressivity, such as first-order logic (FOL) or the ISO standard Common Logic. This inhibits reuse of these ontologies by the wider Semantic Web Community. While converting OWL ontologies to FOL is straightforward, the reverse problem of finding the closest OWL approximation of an FOL ontology is undecidable. However, for most practical purposes, a ``good enough'' OWL approximation need not be perfect to enable wider reuse by the Semantic Web Community. This paper outlines such a conversion approach by first normalizing FOL sentences into a function-free prenex conjunctive normal (FF-PCNF) that strips away minor syntactic differences and then applying a pattern-based approach to identify common OWL axioms. It is tested on the over 2,000 FOL ontologies from the Common Logic Ontology Repository.
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- PAR ID:
- 10292287
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2021)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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