Review of Automatic Maintenance of Multiple Inheritance Ontologies

This is a review article

Comments

This is a clear, precise and well-written article describing the topic. It covers the motivation, process and technology of this approach for the development of a polyhierarchy while being clear that the axiomatisation necessary can have upfront costs. The article also makes clear use of figures demonstrating the use, as well as examples clarifying the more technical statements.

The latter half of the article addresses the issue of normalisation which is a development methodology that enables automatic maintenance of multiple inheritance ontologies. Well this is appropriate material for the article, it is not strictly necessary to completely normalize an ontology to use reasoning. The conclusions, in particular, could be improved in structure by saying that automatic maintaince can be supported by reasoning, and that normalisation exploits this fully.

Otherwise, an excellent article.

Minor Corrections

General

The section titles should use HTML headers, rather than the typographic markup used. Authors email should be hyperlinked.

Multiple Inheritance Ontologies

The effort is considerable, but worthy, as the automated reasoner is able to maintain the whole structure, avoiding human errors. Also, using such expressive axiomisation enables richer queries and other advantages.

Change to

is considerable requiring a richer axiomatisiation but worthwhile as the…

The more expressive axiomatisation also enables richer…

para 2 The difficult on maintaining -→ of maintaining

What is normalisation

Therefore, adequete and precise -→ However, adequete

OWL provides -→ Languages such as OWL provide

(e.g. part_of some (nucleus and (has_function only photosynthesis))

Would be nice to describe what this means in English.

“Normalised CL there” -→ what does CL mean in this context?

Advantages of …

Such modelling dynamic also results in a modular ontology -→ This modelling process

as such relation is the result of both having a common condition -→ as this relation is the result….

Conclusions

long term, a manual maintenance -→ long term, manual maintenance.