Ontology Evolution

Abstract

Ontologies evolve continuously throughout their lifecycle to respond to different change requirements. Several problems emanate from ontology evolution: capturing change requirements, change representation, change impact analysis and resolution, change validation, change traceability, change propagation to dependant artifacts, versioning, etc. The purpose of this chapter is to gather research and current developments to manage ontology evolution. The authors highlight ontology evolution issues and present a state-of-the-art of ontology evolution approach by describing issues raised and the ontology model considered (ontology representation language), and also the ontology engineering tools supporting ontology evolution and maintenance. Furthermore, they sum up the state-of-the-art review by a comparative study based on general characteristics, evolution functionalities supported, and specificities of the existing ontology evolution approaches. At the end of the chapter, the authors discuss future and emerging trends.

Ontology evolution: a process-centric survey

“…In EvoPat (Riess et al ., 2010), the validation is performed using SPARQL 12 queries to determine invalidities (called ‘bad smells’ by Riess et al ., 2010); a ‘bad smell’ is associated with one or more SPARQL Update 13 statements that resolve it. A similar approach (defining inconsistency patterns and resolving them using change patterns) appears in Djedidi and Aufaure (2009, 2010). Moguillansky et al .…”