The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Evolva : a comprehensive approach to ontology evolution

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Zablith, Fouad
Copyright Year	2016
Abstract	Ontology evolution is increasingly gaining momentum in the area of Semantic Web research. Current approaches target the evolution in terms of either content, or change management, without covering both aspects in the same framework. Moreover, they are slowed down as they heavily rely on user input. We tackle the aforementioned issues by proposing Evolva, a comprehensive ontology evolution framework, which handles a complete ontology evolution cycle, and makes use of background knowledge for decreasing user input. 1 Problem and Methodology Ontologies form the basis of Semantic Web systems. As such, they need to be kept up-to-date for the dependent systems to remain usable. With the increase of complexity and changes occurring in the represented domains, ontology evolution becomes a painstaking and time-consuming process. Thus research has witnessed an increased interest in ontology evolution. We regard ontology evolution as the “timely adaptation of an ontology to the arisen changes and the consistent management of these changes” [10]. “Timely adaptation” suggests a quick adaptation, that can only be achieved by decreasing user involvement in the evolution process. However, most of current approaches heavily rely on user input. Moreover, the definition suggests that a successful evolution can only be achieved by having both “adaptation” and “change management”. Yet, as we discuss in Section 4, no existing approach handles the two tasks in one framework. One set of approaches considers evolution as the management of changes performed by users for preserving consistency [11,13,16,17], while another set targets techniques for integrating new knowledge into the ontology [2,5,12,14], without an extensive handling of change and evolution management. Our research tackles the following two main questions: Question 1: How to cover a complete ontology evolution cycle? The focus here is on providing both ontology adaptation and change management. Question 2: How to decrease user involvement in ontology evolution? In order to be as agile as possible, especially in dynamic domains where information is Work funded by the NeOn project under EC grant IST-FF6-027595. L. Aroyo et al. (Eds.): ESWC 2009, LNCS 5554, pp. 944–948, 2009. c © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 Evolva: A Comprehensive Approach to Ontology Evolution 945 abundantly generated, ontology evolution should be performed with the minimum user involvement. Our methodology for resolving the above questions has three main phases: in the first phase we analyzed a concrete case within our KMi Semantic Web portal that helped us determine the main required tasks for evolution. Then we propose an ontology evolution framework covering all previously identified tasks. In the second phase, we are conducting an experiment on using background knowledge, in addition to a pilot system implementation. The third phase will include the evaluation of our approach.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://oro.open.ac.uk/23525/1/fulltext.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article