Coping with Changing Ontologies in a Distributed Environment
Jeff Heflin, James Hendler, Scan Luke · 1999
We discuss the problems associated with versioning ontologies in distributed environments. This is an important issue because ontologies can be of great use in structuring and querying internet information, but many of the Internet's characteristics, such as distributed ownership, rapid evolution, and heterogeneity, make ontology management difficult. We present SHOE, a web-based knowledge representation language, that supports multiple versions of ontologies. We then discuss the features of SHOE that address ontology versioning, the affects of ontology revision on SHOE web pages, and methods for implementing ontology integration using SHOE's extension and version mechanisms. 1. Introduction As the use of ontologies becomes more prevalent, there is a more pressing need for good ontology management schemes. This is especially true once an ontology has been used to structure data, since changing it can be very expensive. Often the solution is to "get it right the first time", however, i...