A DL-Based Approach for Eliminating Concept Restriction Conflicts in Ontology Merging

Ontology plays a significant role in knowledge modeling, sharing and reusing, and the elimination of concept restriction conflicts is one of the great challenges in ontology merging. Existing formal concept analysis (FCA) or similarity based methods mainly focus on concept-relation hierarchy merging, however, less effort has been made for the concept restriction conflict issues, i.e. value and cardinality restriction consistency preservation. In this paper, we present a description logic(DL)-based conflict detection and elimination approach, in which a DL-based tableau algorithm was employed to detect all potential restriction conflicts, and a syntax analysis and semantics reasoning technique was proposed to perform the value and cardinality restriction conflicts elimination. Theoretical analysis and experimental simulation prove that the proposed method seems promising, which can effectively preserve the value and cardinality consistency in multiple related ontology merging.