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Welcome to the RepOSE web site.

Ontologies are recognized as a key technology for the Semantic Web and semantically-enabled applications. However, developing ontologies and aligning ontologies are difficult tasks and the resulting ontologies and mappings between the ontologies may have defects, which can seriously decrease the validity or usefulness of the results of semantically-enabled applications. These applications need high-quality ontologies and alignments. A key step towards this is debugging the ontologies and alignments.

In contrast to most work on debugging that focuses on semantic defects in ontologies, in our work up to date we have focused on the debugging of so-called modeling defects, and in particular the detection and repairing of the missing and wrong is-a structure within ontologies, and the missing and wrong mappings in alignments. Notable contributions by our group are a formalization of the repairing of missing is-a relations as an abduction problem; methods and system for detecting and repairing missing and wrong is-a structure of single ontologies as well as in a network of ontologies, a unified approach to debug is-a structure in and mappings between taxonomies, and an integration of ontology alignment and ontology debugging.

We have developed different versions of our system RepOSE. Currently, different RepOSE versions deal with taxonomies and EL and ALC ontologies. The system allows to debug missing and wrong is-a relations and mappings in a semi-automatic way. Descriptions for the different versions of RepOSE (and in our papers they are all called 'RepOSE') are found in: