Ontology Change Management
Résumé
Ontologies evolve continuously throughout their lifecycle to respond to different change requirements. Handling ontology evolution is not a trivial task. In our work, we focus on issues related to ontology change management in a local context, particularly on consistency maintenance and we present in this paper, a pattern-oriented ontology change management approach. The modelled patterns correspond to the three dimensions change, inconsistency and resolution alternative. Based on these patterns and the links between them, we propose an automated process guiding and controlling change application while maintaining consistency of the evolved ontology. Change management depends closely on the ontology representation model, we focus on OWL language and we consider change impact on logical consistency as specified in OWL DL layer.