MINI:An Ontology Evolution Algorithm for Reducing Impact Ranges
Liu Chen · Chinese Journal of Computers · 2008
Ontology evolution is apt to impact on dependent services and cause them to be redeveloped and redeployed.However,different realizing methods for the same change requirements may result in very big different impact ranges.Today,researches of ontology evolution mainly focus on how to satisfy the change requirements and maintain the consistency of an evolving ontology.Unfortunately,few of them care about how to reduce impact ranges of ontology evolution.This paper proposes an ontology evolution algorithm called MINI,which can effectively reduce impact ranges for an evolution process.Firstly,through deeply analyzing dependent relations among ontology entities and services,the MINI algorithm establishes a math formula to quantify impact ranges.Based on this formula,the MINI algorithm transforms an ontology evolution process into a heuristic graph searching process.Through searching an ontology change path which has minimal impact value,the impact range of an evolution process is greatly reduced.The experiment results show that the average impact ranges caused by the MINI algorithm is greatly less than those of other evolution algorithms.In the context of some practical applications,MINI algorithm has been tested and evaluated.