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

Abstract

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