Ontology engineering is a hard and error-prone task, in which
small changes may lead to errors, or even produce an inconsistent
ontology. As ontologies grow in size, the need for automated
methods for repairing inconsistencies while preserving
as much of the original knowledge as possible increases.
Most previous approaches to this task are based on removing
a few axioms from the ontology to regain consistency.
We propose a new method based on weakening these axioms
to make them less restrictive, employing the use of refinement
operators. We introduce the theoretical framework for
weakening DL ontologies, propose algorithms to repair ontologies
based on the framework, and provide an analysis of
the computational complexity. Through an empirical analysis
made over real-life ontologies, we show that our approach
preserves significantly more of the original knowledge of the
ontology than removing axioms
