Ontology Evolution

1
Ontology Evolution Tools

• Atilla ELÇI
• Dept. of Computer Engineering
• Eastern Mediterranean University

2
Ontology Evolution

• Essentially of adapting ontology in the face of
  changes
• Changing interests of people (using the ontology)
• Changing data
• Change capturing
• Change discovery
• Usage-driven changes
• Data-driven changes

3
Ontology Evolution Process

• Cyclic Phases
• Change capturing
• Change representation
• Semantics of change
• Change implementation
• Change propagation
• Change validation

4
Change Capturing

• Generation of ontology changes from
  explicit/implicit requirements.
• Explicit requirements
• Implicit requirements
• Usage-driven changes
• Due to user behavior
• Data-driven changes
• From (new) instances through
• Data mining
• Formal Concept Analysis
• Heuristics
• Tools KAON, OntoEdit (manual), Text2Onto
  (semi-/automatic)

5
Change Representation

• Identify represent changes
• Modify, Delete, Add operations
• Check Klein 2001 for systems.

6
Reasons of Change and Tools to Deal with

• From Klein 2001

7
Semantics of Change

• Consistency preserving model constraints
• Consistency verification
• Realization

8
Change propagation

• Consistency of dependent artefacts
• Dependent ontology consistency
• Replication ontology consistency

9
Change implementation

• Notification
• Application (as one atomic transaction)
• Logging (also for purposes of backup/restore)

10
Change validation

• Need to address the concerns of rollback

11
Evolution Architecture

• Knowledge worker
• Knowledge portal
• Document base (corpus)
• Ontologies (appl, domain)
• Usage log
• Evolution mngmnt

12
Data-Driven Ontology Changes

• To deal with potential differences evolving over
  time between the ontology model and data.
• Incremental ontology learning
• Tools
• Proton upper-level for SEKT Project
• Text2Onto

13
Usage-Driven Ontology Changes

• Hierarchy pruning (reduction)
• Expansion

14
Ontology Development Tools

• Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited by Michael Denny
• W3C Semantic Web Tools Wiki page

15
Ontolog Conferences

• Grubers Talk Presentation to Ontolog on March
  1, 2007 Grande Challenges for Ontology Design
  (or is it Vente?) . Local copy.
• 2007.01.11 - Thursday, 11-January-2007 -
  Professor Werner Ceusters, from the Ontology
  Research Group (ORG) of the New York State Center
  of Excellence in Bioinformatics Life Sciences
  at the State University of New York at Buffalo
  (USA), presented to the community his talk
  entitled "Realism-based Change Management for
  Quality Assurance in Ontologies and Data
  Repositories" as the 3rd event in the "Ontology
  Measurement Evaluation" Mini-Series ... Please
  refer to details at the session wiki page, at
  ConferenceCall_2007_01_11 ... Audio archives of
  the session. Local copy.

16
References

• John Davies, Rudi Studer, Paul Warren (Editors)
  Semantic Web Technologies Trends and Research in
  Ontology-based Systems, John Wiley Sons (July
  11, 2006). ISBN 0470025964. Ch. 4. pp. 51-70.
• Michael Klein, Combining and relating
  ontologies an analysis of problems and
  solutions, Proc. 17th Intl Joint conf on
  Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-01, Workshop on
  Ontologies and Info Sharing, Vol. 47, pp 53-62,
  Seattle, USA, 2001.
• Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited by Michael Denny
  (published July 14, 2004 on xml.com) along with
  Michael's famous Ontology Editor Survey 2004
  Table.
• W3C Semantic Web Tools Wiki page
• Check Jena, SemWeb, Protégé, Swoop, etc.