Ontology Versioning and Evolution for Semantic Web-Based Applications. 9-month progress report

Abstract

Successful Semantic Web-based applications not only need large amounts of underlying well-organised and well-interrelated ontologies to support their infrastructures, but also need to provide the end-users with the consistent and continuous services as usual while the underlying ontologies changing. Research on ontology versioning and evolution addresses the issues of how ontologies cope with the internal and external changing environment so as to keep ontologies consistent. The existing works on ontology versioning and evolution focus on the changes inside ontology itself, i.e., the relationships and interoperability of the various versions, and largely neglected the issue of how changes during ontology versioning and evolution could affect the existing applications/services. The potential research work presented in this report aims at addressing how we could apply ontology versioning and evolution technologies in the existing applications so as to enable applications to provide consistent and continuous services as usual by adapting to the newly updating underlying ontologies. In this report, a middle layer between the underlying ontologies and dependent applications is proposed to build, which is used to monitor and detect any changes performed on the important parts of an ontology specific for the applications, and divert queries accordingly. The framework and requirements of the middle layer are discussed, in addition to a review of progress to date and anticipated future work.

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