Bibliography on Revision/Révision (2017-06-06)

Networks of ontologies are made of a collection of logic theories, called ontologies, related by alignments. They arise naturally in distributed contexts in which theories are developed and maintained independently, such as the semantic web. In networks of ontologies, inconsistency can come from two different sources: local inconsistency in a particular ontology or alignment, and global inconsistency between them. Belief revision is well-defined for dealing with ontologies; we investigate how it can apply to networks of ontologies. We formulate revision postulates for alignments and networks of ontologies based on an abstraction of existing semantics of networks of ontologies. We show that revision operators cannot be simply based on local revision operators on both ontologies and alignments. We adapt the partial meet revision framework to networks of ontologies and show that it indeed satisfies the revision postulates. Finally, we consider strategies based on network characteristics for designing concrete revision operators.

Alignments between ontologies may be established through agents holding such ontologies attempting at communicating and taking appropriate action when communication fails. This approach has the advantage of not assuming that everything should be set correctly before trying to communicate and of being able to overcome failures. We test here the adaptation of this approach to alignment repair, i.e., the improvement of incorrect alignments. For that purpose, we perform a series of experiments in which agents react to mistakes in alignments. The agents only know about their ontologies and alignments with others and they act in a fully decentralised way. We show that such a society of agents is able to converge towards successful communication through improving the objective correctness of alignments. The obtained results are on par with a baseline of a priori alignment repair algorithms.

Alignments between ontologies may be established through agents holding such ontologies attempting at communicating and taking appropriate action when communication fails. This approach, that we call cultural repair, has the advantage of not assuming that everything should be set correctly before trying to communicate and of being able to overcome failures. We test here the adaptation of this approach to alignment repair, i.e., the improvement of incorrect alignments. For that purpose, we perform a series of experiments in which agents react to mistakes in alignments. The agents only know about their ontologies and alignments with others and they act in a fully decentralised way. We show that cultural repair is able to converge towards successful communication through improving the objective correctness of alignments. The obtained results are on par with a baseline of a priori alignment repair algorithms.