Understanding Ontology Evolution Beyond Deltas.
Georgia Troullinou, Giannis Roussakis, Haridimos Kondylakis, Kostas Stefanidis, Giorgos Flouris · 2016
The dynamic nature of the data on the Web gives rise to a multitude of problems related to the description and anal-ysis of the evolution of such data. Traditional approaches for identifying and analyzing changes are descriptive, focus-ing on the provision of a “delta ” that describes the changes and often overwhelming the user with loads of information. Here, we take an alternative approach which aims at giving a high-level overview of the change process and at identify-ing the most important changes in the ontology. For doing so, we consider different metrics of “change intensity”, tak-ing into account the changes that affected each class and its neighborhood, as well as ontological information related to the importance and connectivity of each class in the dif-ferent versions. We argue that this approach will allow a better understanding of the intent (rather than the actions) of the editor, and a better focusing of the curator analyzing the changes; traditional delta-based approaches can subse-quently be used for a more fine-grained analysis. 1.