Ontology Change Management and Identification of Change Patterns
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Ontology Change Management and Identification of Change Patterns Muhammad Javed · Yalemisew M. Abgaz · Claus Pahl
Received: 16 April 2012 / Revised: 21 November 2012 / Accepted: 20 December 2012 / Published online: 22 May 2013 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Abstract Ontologies can support a variety of purposes, ranging from capturing the conceptual knowledge to the organisation of digital content and information. However, information systems are always subject to change and ontology change management can pose challenges. In this sense, the application and representation of ontology changes in terms of higher-level change operations can describe more meaningful semantics behind the applied change. In this paper, we propose a four-phase process that covers the operationalization, representation and detection of higher-level changes in ontology evolution life cycle. We present different levels of change operators based on the granularity and domain-specificity of changes. The first layer is based on generic atomic level change operators, whereas the next two layers are user-defined (generic/domain-specific) change patterns. We introduce layered change logs for the explicit operational representation of ontology changes. We formalised the change log using a graph-based approach. We introduce a technique to identify composite changes that not only assists in formulating ontology change log data in a more concise manner, but also helps in realizing the semantics and intent behind any applied change. Furthermore, we identify frequent change sequences that are applied as a reference to discover reusable, often domain-specific and usage-driven change patterns. We describe the pattern identification algorithms and evaluate their performance. M. Javed (B) · Y. M. Abgaz · C. Pahl Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin 09, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] Y. M. Abgaz e-mail: [email protected] C. Pahl e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords Customizable ontology evolution · Ontology change patterns · Pattern-based ontology evolution · Change log graph · Graph-based composite change detection · Change pattern discovery algorithms
1 Introduction Ontologies become essential for knowledge sharing activities, especially in areas such as bio-informatics, semantic web, educational technology systems, indexing and retrieval, etc. Ontology-based content models help to take a step forward from traditional content management systems (CMS) to conceptual knowledge modelling, to meet the requirements of the semantically aware content-based systems (CBS). While some generic ontologies (like upper ontologies) evolve at a slower pace, we have been working with non-public ontologies [formalised using the Web Ontology Language (OWL)] used to annotate content in large-scale information systems. In this context, changes happen on a daily basis, triggered by changes in software, its technical or domain environment. Systematic change becomes here a neces
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