Guidelines for a Dynamic Ontology - Integrating Tools of Evolution and Versioning in Ontology

Ontologies are built on systems that conceptually evolve over time. In addition, techniques and languages for building ontologies evolve too. This has led to numerous studies in the field of ontology versioning and ontology evolution. This paper presents a new way to manage the lifecycle of an ontology incorporating both versioning tools and evolution process. This solution, called VersionGraph, is integrated in the source ontology since its creation in order to make it possible to evolve and to be versioned. Change management is strongly related to the model in which the ontology is represented. Therefore, we focus on the OWL language in order to take into account the impact of the changes on the logical consistency of the ontology like specified in OWL DL

Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible

Change Management: The Core Task of Ontology Versioning and Evolution

Change management as a key issue in ontology versioning and evolution is still not fully addressed, which to some extent forms a barrier against the smooth process of ontology evolution. The key issue in the support of evolving ontologies is to distinguish and recognize the changes during the process of ontology evolution. Most of the current popular work on ontology versioning do not keep a record of the changes in the ontology, thus preventing the user from tracking those changes back and forward, or to at least understand the rational behind those changes. We are proposing an approach to get the evidences of ontology changes, keep track of them, and manage them in an engineering fashion

DOOR: towards a formalization of ontology relations

In this paper, we describe our ongoing effort in describing and formalizing semantic relations that link ontolo- gies with each others on the Semantic Web in order to create an ontology, DOOR, to represent, manipulate and reason upon these relations. DOOR is a Descriptive Ontology of Ontology Relations which intends to define relations such as inclusion, versioning, similarity and agreement using ontological primitives as well as rules. Here, we provide a detailed description of the methodology used to design the DOOR ontology, as well as an overview of its content. We also describe how DOOR is used in a complete framework (called KANNEL) for detecting and managing semantic relations between ontologies in large ontology repositories. Applied in the context of a large collection of automatically crawled ontologies, DOOR and KANNEL provide a starting point for analyzing the underlying structure of the network of ontologies that is the Semantic Web

Expliciting semantic relations between ontologies in large ontology repositories

and other research outputs Expliciting semantic relations between ontologies in large ontology repositorie

An Approach to Cope with Ontology Changes for Ontology-based Applications

Keeping track of ontology changes is becoming a critical issue for ontology-based applications because updating an ontology that is in use may result in inconsistencies between the ontology and the knowledge base, dependent ontologies and dependent applications/services. Current research concentrates on the creation of ontologies and how to manage ontology changes in terms of the attempts to ease the communications between ontology versions and keep consistent with the instances, and there is little work available on controlling the impact to dependent applications/services which is the aims of the system presented in this paper. The approach we propose in this paper is to manually capture and log ontology changes, use this log to analyse incoming RDQL queries and amend them as necessary. Revised queries can then be used to query the knowledge base of the applications/services. We present the infrastructure of our approach based on the problems and scenarios identified within ontology-based systems. We discuss the issues met during our design and implementation, and consider some problems whose solutions will be beneficial to the development of our approach

A Systematic Review of Tracing Solutions in Software Product Lines

Software Product Lines are large-scale, multi-unit systems that enable massive, customized production. They consist of a base of reusable artifacts and points of variation that provide the system with flexibility, allowing generating customized products. However, maintaining a system with such complexity and flexibility could be error prone and time consuming. Indeed, any modification (addition, deletion or update) at the level of a product or an artifact would impact other elements. It would therefore be interesting to adopt an efficient and organized traceability solution to maintain the Software Product Line. Still, traceability is not systematically implemented. It is usually set up for specific constraints (e.g. certification requirements), but abandoned in other situations. In order to draw a picture of the actual conditions of traceability solutions in Software Product Lines context, we decided to address a literature review. This review as well as its findings is detailed in the present article.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, 7 table

Ontology Change Management in Protégé

Ontology schemas tend to change and evolve over time to meet new requirements. This change may invalidate dependent applications if there is no dynamic adaptation to the changes made to underlying ontologies. Protégé, as a popular ontology development tool, should meet the challenges addressed by the evolving ontology. In this paper, we will briefly analyse the current ontology-change management in Protégé, and propose some extensions to facilitate change traceability by external application and services

Tracking decision-making during architectural design

There is a powerful cocktail of circumstances governing the way decisions are made during the architectural design process of a building project. There is considerable potential for misunderstandings, inappropriate changes, change which give rise to unforeseen difficulties, decisions which are not notified to all interested parties, and many other similar problems. The paper presents research conducted within the frame of the EPSRC funded ADS project aiming at addressing the problems linked with the evolution and changing environment of project information to support better decision-making. The paper presents the conceptual framework as well as the software environment that has been developed to support decision-making during building projects, and reports on work carried out on the application of the approach to the architectural design stage. This decision-tracking environment has been evaluated and validated by professionals and practitioners from industry using several instruments as described in the paper