Finding and specifying relations between ontology versions
Michel C. A. Klein, Atanas Kiryakov, Dieter Fensel · 2002
Interoperability between different existing ontologies is import to leverage the use of ontologies. However, the interoperability between different versions of ontologies is at least as important. Especially when ontologies are used in a distributed and dynamic context as the Web, we can expect that ontologies will rapidly evolve and thus may cause incompatibilities. This paper describes a system that helps to keep different versions of web-based ontologies interoperable. To achieve this, the system allows ontology engineers to compare versions of ontology and to specify the conceptual relations between the different versions of concepts. Internally, the system maintains the transformations between ontologies, some meta-data about the version, as well as the conceptual relation between concepts in different versions. This paper briefly describes the system, presents the mechanism that we used to find and classify changes in RDF-based ontologies, and discusses how this may be used to specify relations between ontologies that improve their interoperability.