A novel ontology evolution methodology
Ali Rahnama, Ahmad Abdollahzadeh Barforoush · Journal of Web Engineering · 2015
In recent years, ontology engineering has received a great amount of attention and has advanced greatly. Today, ontologies are finding their role in knowledge and information systems. To keep up with the dynamic aspect of knowledge, the need for ontology evolution systems has emerged. Such systems help facilitate the management of changes on the ontology in a systematic way. To define a systematic way of facilitating management of changes, a process model is needed. Therefore in this paper, we present our novel ontology evolution process model which uses ontology change rules to achieve this goal. These change rules are defined via the SWRL rule representation language. This new approach to ontology evolution helps the ontology evolution process by preserving the consistency of the ontology throughout the ontology evolution process. To classify ontology changes, we will also present our novel taxonomy of ontology changes. To test the feasibility of our presented process model, we have implemented the OntoEvol system. It is also presented in this paper.