Evaluation of techniques for inconsistency handling in OWL 2 QL ontologies

In this paper we present the Quonto Inconsistent Data handler (QuID). QuID is a reasoner for OWL 2 QL that is based on the system Quonto and is able to deal with inconsistent ontologies. The central aspect of QuID is that it implements two different, orthogonal strategies for dealing with inconsistency: ABox repairing techniques, based on data manipulation, and consistent query answering techniques, based on query rewriting. Moreover, by exploiting the ability of Quonto to delegate the management of the ABox to a relational database system (DBMS), such techniques are potentially able to handle very large inconsistent ABoxes. For the above reasons, QuID allows for experimentally comparing the above two different strategies for inconsistency handling in the context of OWL 2 QL. We thus report on the experimental evaluation that we have conducted using QuID. Our results clearly point out that inconsistency-tolerance in OWL 2 QL ontologies is feasible in practical cases. Moreover, our evaluation singles out the different sources of complexity for the data manipulation technique and the query rewriting technique, and allows for identifying the conditions under which one method is more efficient than the other. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.