Tech Reports

ULCS-08-012

Dynamic Ontology Evolution in Open Environments

Ignazio Palmisano, Valentina Tamma, Luigi Iannone, Terry Payne and Paul Doran

Abstract

Changes in an ontology may have a disruptive impact on any system using it. This impact may depend on structural changes such as name changes or relations between concepts, or it may be related to a change in the expected performance of the reasoning tasks. As the number of systems using ontologies is expected to increase this problem is likely to occur more frequently, and, given the open nature of the Semantic Web, new ontologies and modifications to existing ones are to be expected. Dynamically handling these changes, without requiring human intervention, is a key requirement for successful applications. This paper presents a system that isolates groups of related axioms in an OWL ontology, so that a change in one or more axioms can be automatically localised to a part of the ontology. In addition, we report the results on evaluating the effectiveness of our approach on large ontologies.

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