Ontology evolution: a framework and its application to RDF

Konstantinidis, George, Flouris, Giorgos, Grigoris, Antoniou and Christophides, Vassilis (2007) Ontology evolution: a framework and its application to RDF. Proceedings of the Joint ODBIS & SWDB Workshop on Semantic Web, Ontologies, Databases (SWDB-ODBIS-07), , Vienna, Austria.

Abstract

The algorithms dealing with the incorporation of new knowledge in an ontology often share a rather standard process of dealing with changes. This process consists of the determination of the allowed change operations, the identification of the inconsistencies that could be caused by each such operation as well as the various alternatives to deal with each such inconsistency, and, finally, some (manual or automatic) selection mechanism that allows the determination of the “best” of these alternatives. Unfortunately, most ontology evolution algorithms implement these steps using a case-based, ad-hoc methodology, which is cumbersome and error-prone. In this paper we propose a general framework for ontology change management that generalizes the methodology employed by existing tools. The introduction of this framework allows us to devise a whole class of ontology evolution algorithms, which, due to their formal underpinnings, avoid many of the problems exhibited by ad-hoc frameworks. We exploit this framework by implementing a specific ontology evolution algorithm for RDF ontologies.

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