Brave and Cautious Reasoning in EL

ABSTRACT. Developing and maintaining ontologies is an expensive and error-prone task. After an error is detected, users may have to wait for a long time before a corrected version of the ontology is available. In the meantime, one might still want to derive meaningful knowledge from the ontology, while avoiding the known errors. We introduce brave and cautious reasoning and show that it is hard for EL. We then propose methods for improving the reasoning times by precompiling information about the known errors and using proof-theoretic techniques for computing justifications. A prototypical implementation shows that our approach is feasible for large ontologies used in practice.