Ontology Evolution: A Framework and its Application to RDF

George Konstantinidis (1,2)
Giorgos Flouris (2)
Grigoris Antoniou (1,2)
Vassilis Christophides (1,2)

(1) Department of Computer Science, University of Crete 
gconstan@csd.uoc.gr
(2) Institute of Computer Science, FO.R.T.H., Heraklion, Greece
{fgeo,christop,antoniou}@ics.forth.gr


Abstract
The algorithms dealing with the incorporation of new knowledge in an
ontology often share a rather standard pattern of dealing with
changes. This pattern consists of the determination of the allowed
change operations, the identification of the inconsistencies that
could be caused by each such operation as well as the various
alternatives to deal with each such inconsistency, and, finally,
some (manual or automatic) selection mechanism that allows the
determination of the ``best'' of these alternatives. Unfortunately,
most ontology evolution algorithms implement these steps using a
case-based, ad-hoc methodology, which is cumbersome and error-prone.
In this paper we propose a general framework for ontology change
management that generalizes the pattern employed by existing tools.
The introduction of this framework allows us to devise a whole class
of ontology evolution algorithms, which, due to their formal
underpinnings, avoid many of the problems exhibited by ad-hoc
methodologies. We exploit this framework by implementing a specific
ontology evolution algorithm for RDF ontologies.