The justificatory structure of OWL ontologies

Current ontology development tools offer debugging support by presenting justifications for entailments of OWL ontologies. In many cases even a single entailment may have many distinct justifications, and justifications for distinct entailments may be critically related. We call the set of relations between multiple justifications the justificatory structure of an ontology. A restricted analysis of justificatory structure has already been successfully exploited to reduce effort when debugging ontologies with large numbers of unsatisfiable classes by identifying root unsatisfiable classes. In this paper we present a preliminary analytical framework for the justificatory structure of an ontology and explore possible applications.