OWL Explanation

An API and reference implementation for generating justifications for entailments in OWL ontologies.

Maven Dependency

<dependency>
    <groupId>net.sourceforge.owlapi</groupId>
    <artifactId>owlexplanation</artifactId>
    <version>5.0.0</version>
</dependency>

Example Usage

import org.semanticweb.owl.explanation.api.*;
import org.semanticweb.owlapi.model.*;
import org.semanticweb.owlapi.reasoner.OWLReasonerFactory;

OWLReasonerFactory rf = ; // Get hold of a reasoner factory
OWLOntology ont = ; // Reference to an OWLOntology

// Create the explanation generator factory which uses reasoners provided by the specified
// reasoner factory
ExplanationGeneratorFactory<OWLAxiom> genFac = ExplanationManager.createExplanationGeneratorFactory(rf);

// Now create the actual explanation generator for our ontology
ExplanationGenerator<OWLAxiom> gen = genFac.createExplanationGenerator(ont);

// Ask for explanations for some entailment
OWLAxiom entailment ; // Get a reference to the axiom that represents the entailment that we want explanation for

// Get our explanations.  Ask for a maximum of 5.
Set<Explanation<OWLAxiom>> expl = gen.getExplanations(entailment, 5);

Explanations for Inconsistent Ontologies

To obtain explanations for inconsistent ontologies the InconsistentOntologyExplanationGeneratorFactory can be used. Ask for explanations for SubClassOf(owl:Thing owl:Nothing).