Say we have this simple ontology as a toy example:
I now receive evidence about a certain object x (for example, "x is a boat", "x is a car") and want to make a statement on what I know about this object.
A sensible approach would be to use my tree and calculate the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of my evidence, and return that as a result. In my example (car and boat), this would result in vehicle.
Let's now say that I have evidence that an object y is a car and a vehicle. The LCA of these is vehicle. In this case, however, I want the result to be car, since the evidence of y being a vehicle does not contradict it being a car.
I implemented this alternative LCA algorithm (by ignoring evidence that's on the path to root of other evidence), but have not found anything about such an approach on the internet. Is there a name for the alternative algorithm I used?
From your description I think you're implementing a least common subsumer algorithm: the most specific class that subsumes two or more class expressions, and can also be equal to one such class.