Repairing Ontologies via Axiom Weakening
  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.
