Ontology Evolution within Ontology Editors.

Abstract

An ontology over a period of time needs to be modified to reflect changes in the real world, changes in the user’s requirements, drawbacks in the initial design, to incorporate additional functionality or to allow for incremental improvement. Although changes are inevitable during the development and deployment of an ontology, most of the current ontology editors unfortunately do not provide enough support for efficient copying with changes. Since changes are the force that drives the evolution process, in this paper we discuss the requirements for the ontology editors in order to support ontology evolution.