Ontology versioning on the semantic web

Abstract

Ontologies are often seen as basic building blocks for the Semantic Web, as they provide a reusable piece of knowledge about a specific domain. However, those pieces of knowledge are not static, but evolve over time. Domain changes, adaptations to different tasks, or changes in the conceptualization require modifications of the ontology. The evolution of ontologies causes operability problems, which will hamper their effective reuse. A versioning mechanism might help to reduce those problems, as it will make the relations between different revisions of an ontology explicit. This paper will discuss the problem of ontology versioning. Inspired by the work done in database schema versioning and program interface versioning, it will also propose building blocks for the most important aspects of a versioning mechanism, i.e., ontology identification and change specification.