Guidelines for a Dynamic Ontology - Integrating Tools of Evolution and Versioning in Ontology

TL;DR

This paper introduces VersionGraph, a novel framework for managing ontology lifecycle by integrating evolution and versioning tools directly into OWL ontologies, ensuring logical consistency during changes.

Contribution

It proposes a new approach to combine ontology evolution and versioning within a unified model, specifically tailored for OWL ontologies, enhancing change management and consistency.

Findings

VersionGraph effectively integrates evolution and versioning.

The approach maintains logical consistency in OWL DL.

It supports comprehensive change management.

Abstract

Ontologies are built on systems that conceptually evolve over time. In addition, techniques and languages for building ontologies evolve too. This has led to numerous studies in the field of ontology versioning and ontology evolution. This paper presents a new way to manage the lifecycle of an ontology incorporating both versioning tools and evolution process. This solution, called VersionGraph, is integrated in the source ontology since its creation in order to make it possible to evolve and to be versioned. Change management is strongly related to the model in which the ontology is represented. Therefore, we focus on the OWL language in order to take into account the impact of the changes on the logical consistency of the ontology like specified in OWL DL.