Bridging the Semantic Gap Between Ontology Versions

Ontologies evolve over time, when they are altered to correct errors, to accommodate new information or to adjust the representation of the domain. Hence there is a need for methods and means to manage the ontology evolution in order to ensure that applications using different versions of an ontology remain compatible with respect each other and metadata annotated. In this paper an ontology versioning framework is presented to enable ontology versioning. The presented approach aims to provide means for expressing the relations between modified concepts after a change has occurred, and in this way to enable compatibility and reasoning based on an ontology version history. We propose change bridges to be used as mappings between resources in successive ontology versions.