ISWC Tutorial: Working with Explanations of OWL Entailments

This is a reminder that Matthew Horridge and I are looking forward to  
presenting the ISWC explanation tutorial on the 25th [1]. We hope to  
see many of you there. In case that, in your work with ontologies, you  
have come across entailments that you found hard to understand, we  
encourage you to bring them with you.

Cheers

Thomas

[1] http://iswc2009.semanticweb.org/wiki/index.php/ISWC_2009_Tutorials/Working_with_Explanations_of_OWL_Entailments

Abstract: In complex ontologies, users are often baffled by the  
behavior of the reasoner. Even if we restrict ourselves to "buggy"  
entailments (e.g., unsatisfiable classes) it is often unclear why  
those entailments hold. The reasons as to why an entailment arises in  
an ontology can range from fairly simple localized glitches through to  
highly non-obvious problems scattered throughout the ontology. In the  
case of very large ontologies, manually pinpointing the reasons for an  
entailment can be a frustrating task, especially as it is typically  
only a very small percentage of the ontology that is responsible for  
the entailment. Tool support in the form of an explanation workbench  
plug-in has recently been made available for Protege 4. This plug-in  
makes it possible to obtain and browse explanations for entailments.  
Using the explanation workbench plug-in, the tutorial will introduce  
explanation of entailments in OWL. The tutorial will cover everything  
from now standard justification finding services to cutting edge  
experimental support for model exploration. Participants will be  
exposed to a wide range of interesting and challenging examples  
collected over the course of several years in doing research on  
explanation.

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Dr Thomas Schneider                    schneider (at) cs.man.ac.uk  |
|  School of Computer Science       http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~schneidt  |
|  Kilburn Building, Room 2.114                 phone +44 161 2756136  |
|  University of Manchester                                            |
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|  Manchester M13 9PL                                      (o~o)       |
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