OM4OV: Leveraging Ontology Matching for Ontology Versioning

TL;DR

This paper introduces OM4OV, a framework that adapts ontology matching techniques for ontology versioning, enhancing change detection and explanation capabilities in the Semantic Web.

Contribution

It formalizes the OM4OV framework, implements it in Agent-OM, and proposes the CR mechanism to improve ontology versioning accuracy and efficiency.

Findings

OM systems can be reused for OV tasks effectively.

Without extensions, OM systems may produce skewed measurements and poor change detection.

The CR mechanism improves OV performance by reducing matching candidates.

Abstract

Due to the dynamic nature of the Semantic Web, version control is necessary to manage changes in widely used ontologies. Despite the long-standing recognition of ontology versioning (OV) as a crucial component of efficient ontology management, many approaches treat OV as similar to ontology matching (OM) and directly reuse OM systems for OV tasks. In this study, we systematically analyse similarities and differences between OM and OV and formalise an OM4OV framework to offer more advanced OV support. The framework is implemented and evaluated in the state-of-the-art OM system Agent-OM. The experimental results indicate that OM systems can be effectively reused for OV tasks, but without necessary extensions, can produce skewed measurements, poor performance in detecting update entities, and limited explanation of false mappings. To tackle these issues, we propose an optimisation method called the cross-reference (CR) mechanism, which builds on existing OM alignments to reduce the number of matching candidates and to improve overall OV performance.