Change Representation For OWL 2 Ontologies

Abstract

Ontologies are entities that evolve over time; therefore it is essential to represent and manage changes to ontologies along with the ontologies themselves. In this paper we propose a change ontology for the OWL 2 ontology language. This change ontology comprises a fine-grained taxonomy of ontology changes that considers the lowest-level atomic operations that can be performed in an ontology, but in addition also on other abstraction levels (ontology entity, composite). It thus allows to describe on a fine grained level how an ontology has changed from one version to another, and it also provides the vocabulary to talk about the changes that enables, for instance, to associate provenance or other rich metadata, such as argumentation structures. Additionally, we discuss some useful applications of our change ontology and its technological support.