an approach to detection ontology changes
Ontologies change and evolve both on the level of schema and individuals in order to meet requirements of changing world. Changes involve adding, deleting and modifying elements in the ontology both on structural (schema related) and content (individuals related) levels. The changes can lead to incorrect conclusions and can cause malfunction of systems, which use ontology data. In this paper we describe a proposal of the method for automated detection of currentness of presented data, including meta-data, which are represented by an ontology. Method comes out from a detection of changes between different versions of the ontology. Besides identifying modifications in the ontology, the purpose of the method lies also in identifying equivalent elements, thanks to which we are able to track information sources over time. We describe possibilities of automated identification of changes between ontologies using heuristic methods and their realization as a software tool called OntoDiff for comparing ontologies.
ontology change heuristics content change ontodiff software tool relative text comparison structural change