Repairing Description Logic Ontologies by Weakening Axioms

The classical approach for repairing a Description Logic ontology O in the sense of removing an unwanted consequence $\alpha$ is to delete a minimal number of axioms from O such that the resulting ontology O’ does not have the consequence $\alpha$. However, the complete deletion of axioms may be too rough, in the sense that it may also remove consequences that are actually wanted. To alleviate this problem, we propose a more gentle way of repair in which axioms are not necessarily deleted, but only weakened. On the one hand, we investigate general properties of this gentle repair method. On the other hand, we propose and analyze concrete approaches for weakening axioms expressed in the Description Logic EL.