Metaproperty-Guided Deletion from the Instance-Level of a Knowledge Base

Abstract

The ontology modeling practice of engineering metaproperties of concepts is a well-known technique. Some metaproperties of concepts describe the dynamics of concept instances, i.e. how instances can and cannot be altered. We investigate how deletions in an ontology-based knowledge base interact with the metaproperties rigidity and dependence. A particularly useful effect are delete cascades. We evaluate how rigidity and dependence may guide delete cascades in an engineering application. A case study in the area of product development shows that beyond explicitly defined deletions, our approach achieves further automated and desirable deletions of facts with high precision and good recall.

Cascading Forgetting in Product Development Challenges and Evaluation

“…Recall stands for how many of the desired forgetting operations, the Cascading Forgetting operator has performed. The precision of the Cascading Forgetting was 1, which indicates, that the engineers agreed with all deletions the operator has performed and there is no case the operator deletes to much (Schon et al, 2018). The recall was comparatively low with 0.48, which means the engineers expected more forgetting operations, which are not performed by the operator (Schon et al, 2018).…”

“…The precision of the Cascading Forgetting was 1, which indicates, that the engineers agreed with all deletions the operator has performed and there is no case the operator deletes to much (Schon et al, 2018). The recall was comparatively low with 0.48, which means the engineers expected more forgetting operations, which are not performed by the operator (Schon et al, 2018). For more detail on how the evaluation was conducted further read Schon et al (2018).…”

“…The Cascading Forgetting operation is a meta-property-guided deletion, which exploits the metaproperties rigidity and dependency to guide the deletion and the desired cascading behaviour (Schon et al, 2018). Metaproperties provide information about classes and their relationship to one another.…”

“…The Cascading Forgetting operator combines the dependency-and rigidity-guided deletions, allowing interactions between rigid concepts and dependencies, which can lead to further forgetting . A dependency-guided deletion can lead to the deletion of a rigid assertion, which will cause the deletion of all related axioms, leading to the violation of dependencies (Schon et al, 2018).…”

“…For the formal definition of dependency-and rigidity-guided deletion further read Schon et al (2018). The use of metaproperty-guided deletion seems to be well-suited for Cascading Forgetting of engineering design knowledge, because it specifically rejects the highly interdependent elements.…”