A New Approach to Managing the Evolution of OWL Ontologies

The growing demand for large and complex ontologies present new challenges related to their design, maintenance and evolution. In this paper, the authors propose an approach to managing the evolution of large OWL ontologies. Unlike conventional approaches that focus on the versioning of entire ontology, they use an evolutionary log to track the lifeline of each axiom or annotation that appears in an evolving ontology. They introduce the formal model for their ontology evolution framework, present related algorithms, and discuss the potential implementation scenarios.