Guidelines for a Dynamic Ontology - Integrating Tools of Evolution and Versioning in Ontology
This addresses the challenge of dynamic ontology management for researchers and practitioners in semantic web and knowledge representation, though it appears incremental.
The paper tackles the problem of managing ontology lifecycles by integrating versioning tools and evolution processes, presenting VersionGraph as a solution that enables ontologies to evolve and be versioned from creation while maintaining logical consistency in OWL DL.
Ontologies are built on systems that conceptually evolve over time. In addition, techniques and languages for building ontologies evolve too. This has led to numerous studies in the field of ontology versioning and ontology evolution. This paper presents a new way to manage the lifecycle of an ontology incorporating both versioning tools and evolution process. This solution, called VersionGraph, is integrated in the source ontology since its creation in order to make it possible to evolve and to be versioned. Change management is strongly related to the model in which the ontology is represented. Therefore, we focus on the OWL language in order to take into account the impact of the changes on the logical consistency of the ontology like specified in OWL DL.