Reasoning-Supported Interactive Revision of Knowledge Bases

Quality control is an essential task within ontology development projects especially when the knowledge formalization is partially automatized. In this paper, we propose a reasoning-based, interactive approach to support the revision of formalized knowledge. We state consistency criteria for revision states and introduce the notion of revision closure, based on which the revision of ontologies is partially automatized. Additionally, we propose a notion of axiom impact which is used to determine a beneficial order of axiom evaluation in order to further increase the effectiveness of ontology revision. Finally, we develop the notion of decision spaces, which are structures for calculating and updating the revision closure and axiom impact. The use of decision spaces saves on average 75% of the costly reasoning operations during a revision.