Inconsistencies, negations and changes in ontologies

Ontology management and maintenance are considered cornerstone issues in current Semantic Web applications in which semantic integration and ontological reasoning play a fundamental role. The ability to deal with inconsistency and to accommodate change is of utmost importance in real-world applications of ontological reasoning and management, wherein the need for expressing negated assertions also arises naturally. For this purpose, precise, formal definitions of the the different types of inconsistency and negation in ontologies are required. Unfortunately, ontology languages based on Description Logics (DLs) do not provide enough expressive power to represent axiom negations. Furthermore, there is no single, well-accepted notion of inconsistency and negation in the Semantic Web community, due to the lack of a common and solid foundational framework. In this paper, we propose a general framework accounting for inconsistency, negation and change in ontologies. Different levels of negation and inconsistency in DL-based ontologies are distinguished. We demonstrate how this framework can provide a foundation for reasoning with and management of dynamic ontologies.