Ontology Evolution: Not the Same as Schema Evolution

Abstract

As ontology development becomes a more ubiquitous and collaborative process, ontology versioning and evolution becomes an important area of ontology research. The many similarities between database-schema evolution and ontology evolution will allow us to build on the extensive research in schema evolution. However, there are also important differences between database schemas and ontologies. The differences stem from different usage paradigms, the presence of explicit semantics, and different knowledge models. A lot of problems that existed only in theory in database research come to the forefront as practical problems in ontology evolution. These differences have important implications for the development of ontology-evolution frameworks: The traditional distinction between versioning and evolution is not applicable to ontologies. There are several dimensions along which compatibility between versions must be considered. The set of change operations for ontologies is different. We must develop automatic techniques for finding similarities and differences between versions.

Methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies. Where is their meeting point?

“…However, many other methods and methodologies have been proposed for other tasks, such as ontology reengineering [29], ontology learning [2,45], ontology evaluation [25,27,35,36,41,42], ontology evolution [47,48,58,63], ontology merging [59], etc. In this paper, we will only focus on methodologies for building ontologies.…”

A Framework for Developing Manufacturing Service Capability Information Model

“…Guidance for building ontologies either from scratch or reusing other ontologies can be found in [11]. After establishing the ontology, an important issue is that ontology tends to change and evolve over time due to changes in the domain, changes in conceptualization, or changes in the explicit specification [12]. Works in managing ontology change and evolution are well-summarized in [13].…”

EvoPat – Pattern-Based Evolution and Refactoring of RDF Knowledge Bases

“…Most work concerned with ontology evolution patterns identifies a number of useful patterns but gives only an informal description which cannot be used for implementing an evolution software system. In [10], evolution patterns that work on the ontology level are identified. A classification of evolution patterns in four levels of abstraction is presented in [7].…”

“…Noy and Klein determine in [10] to what extent ontology evolution resembles schema evolution, which has been extensively researched in the database community. By arguing that different versions of an ontology have to be kept in parallel, they conclude that the traditional distinction between schema evolution and schema versioning is not applicable to ontology evolution and ontology versioning.…”