Towards Ontology Lifecycle: Building, Matching and Evolution to Semantically Integrate Application Ontologies

Abstract

Semantic interoperability among applications, systems, and services are mostly based on ontology. Its increase usage in Information Systems and knowledge sharing systems raises the importance of ontology development and maintenance. It is essential for sharing information among independent organizations, exchange of information among heterogeneous systems. To make this possible, we need to carefully model the domain knowledge while preserving its semantics. Ontologies are complex in nature and often structured. Their development and maintenance incorporate research areas like: building, evolution, versioning, matching and integration where these are fundamentally different. We uncover the gap in the current research area of ontology building, matching and evolution. We propose a research direction based on ontology construction using knowledge extraction, matching evolution between versions. This paper presents system architecture to manage the lifecycle of the application ontology incorporating building, matching and evolution processes. This solution is integrated in the source ontology since its creation in order to make it possible to evolve and to be versioned.