2026-08-03T09:23:42Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:25051 2026-03-19T12:49:44Z ddc:004 open_access

Explaining Reasoning Results for Description Logic Ontologies (Invited Paper) Koopmann, Patrick Explanations Justifications Proofs Craig Interpolation Contrastive Explanations The Web Ontology Language (OWL), grounded in description logics, enables reasoning systems to infer implicit knowledge in a transparent manner. However, the expressivity of description logics and the complexity of large ontologies often results in reasoning outcomes that are hard to understand without additional tool support. Explanations of these outcomes are essential for users to understand ontology content, communicate its structure and behavior effectively, and debug undesired or missing inferences. This chapter provides an overview of the central explanation techniques that have been developed for explaining reasoning with description logic ontologies. Here, we consider both explanations for positive entailments (explaining why something can be deduced), as well as negative entailments (why something cannot be deduced). More specifically, we discuss justifications, proofs and interpolation as a means to explain positive entailments, and abduction for explaining negative entailments, where we also have a closer look at practical algorithms as well as practical and theoretical challenges. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Patrick Koopmann 2025 Is Part Of OASIcs, Volume 138, Joint Proceedings of the 20th and 21st Reasoning Web Summer Schools (RW 2024 & RW 2025) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/OASIcs.RW.2024/2025.6 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-250514 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.RW.2024/2025.6 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode