High-Level Change Detection in the Semantic Web

Giorgos Flouris

Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, GREECE

fgeo@ics.forth.gr

Abstract
The Semantic Web vision aims to bring machine-understandable (rather 
than machine-readable) content to the web user; this will allow the 
development of more sophisticated services and a better browsing 
experience by the end user. Ontologies are viewed as the key means 
through which the Semantic Web vision can be realized, as they can 
help in the representation of the content of a web page in a formal 
manner, so as to be suitable for use by an automated computer agent, 
crawler, search engine or other web service. Ontologies are dynamic 
entities which change over time. Often, it makes sense to record the 
changes that occurred between the different versions of ontologies for 
visualization or communication purposes, but such changes are often 
difficult or impossible to record as they happen. The focus of this talk 
is on the change detection problem which deals with the 'a posteriori' 
detection of changes. We describe a change language (and the corresponding 
detection algorithm) that allows the formulation of concise and intuitive 
deltas, which are expressive enough to describe unambiguously any possible 
change and that can be effectively and efficiently detected.