Special Issue on Ontology Dynamics

Recently, there has been a growing interest in encoding human knowledge using ontologies represented under some formal representation language (e.g. in the Semantic Web). Simply creating an ontology is not enough though; ontologies, just like any structure holding knowledge, need to be updated as well. There are several reasons why an ontology should change: changes could be initiated because of a change in the world being modelled; the users’ needs may change, requiring a different conceptualization; knowledge previously unknown, classified or otherwise unavailable may become known; or a design flaw may have been noticed in the original conceptualization. In all these cases, the representation of knowledge in the ontology should be modified so as to form a more accurate or adequate conceptualization of the domain. Such a modification presents several difficulties from both the practical and the theoretical point of view, as it is not always clear what the expected, or desired, result of any particular modification should be, nor how such a result can be determined. In addition, it raises a number of peripheral, but equally important, problems, such as ontology versioning, inconsistency handling, ontology evolution and integration, change propagation, reasoning in the presence of change and others, which can all be considered to be under the umbrella of the ontology dynamics field.