Instance-driven TBox Revision in DL-Lite

ABSTRACT. The development and maintenance of large and complex ontologies are often time-consuming and error-prone. Thus, automated ontology learning and revision have attracted intensive research interest. In data-centric applications where the ontology is designed based on or automated learnt from the data, when new data instances are added that contradict to the ontology, it is often desirable to incrementally revise the ontology according to the added data. In this paper, we address this problem using TBox revision and allow TBox axioms to be revised by ABox assertions. To provide a model-theoretic characterisation of minimal change, we introduce and apply the type semantics for DL-Lite TBoxes. We define a concrete revision operator using the type semantics, and show that it possesses desired properties.