Reasoning with inconsistent ontologies involves using an inconsistency reasoner to get meaningful answers from inconsistent ontologies. This paper introduces an improved inconsistency reasoner, which selects consistent subsets using minimal inconsistent sets and a resolution method, to improve the run-time performance of the reasoning processing. A minimal inconsistent set contains a minimal explanation for the inconsistency of a given ontology. Thus, it can replace the consistency checking operation, which is executed frequently in existing approaches. When selecting subsets of the inconsistent ontology, formulas which can be directly or indirectly resolved with the negation of the query formula are selected because only those formulas affect the consequences of the reasoner. Therefore, the complexity of the reasoning processing is significantly reduced. Tests show that the run-time performance of the inconsistency reasoner is significantly improved.
In order to optimize ontology reasoning, a novel boundary-based modular extraction method is introduced for ontologies in EL^＋＋ description logics. The proposed module extraction method is capable of identifying relevant axioms in an ontology based on the notion of boundaries of symbols, with respect to a given reasoning task. Exactness of the method is ensured by discovering all axioms in the original ontology that may be directly or indirectly relevant to boundaries of symbols used in the reasoning task. Compactness of the method is ensured by boundary partition and intersection operation performed in the process of module extraction. The theoretical foundation and a practical algorithm for computing the proposed axiom-based modules are presented. The proposed algorithm is implemented for the description logic EL^＋＋. Experimental results on realworld ontologies show that, based on the proposed modularization method, the performance of ontology reasoning can be significantly improved.
