After becoming a W3C Recommendation, OWL is becoming increasingly widely accepted and used. However most people still find
it difficult to create and use OWL ontologies. On major difficulty is “debugging” the ontologies – discovering why a reasoners
has inferred that a class is “unsatisfiable” (inconsistent). Even for people who do understand OWL and the logical meaning
of the underlining description logic, discovering why concepts are unsatisfiable can be difficult. Most modern tableaux reasoners
do not provide any explanation as to why the classes are unsatisfiable. This paper presents a ‘black boxed’ heuristic approach
based on identifying common errors and inferences.