Handling Ontology Change: Survey and Proposal for a Future Research Direction

One of the crucial tasks towards the realization of the vision of the Semantic Web is the efficient encoding of human knowledge in ontologies. The proper maintenance of these, usually large, structures and, in particular, the adaptation of ontologies to new knowledge (ontology change) is one of the most challenging problems in the Semantic Web research. Due to the uncontrolled and decentralized nature of the Semantic Web, ontology change is a complicated and multifaceted task; this has led to the emergence of several different, but closely related, research areas that deal with the problem. In this report, we attempt to draw a clear line between these research areas, by underlying their relations, interactions and overlaps. Our work uncovers a certain gap in the current research and proposes a supplementary research direction, based on belief revision. We argue that our approach uncovers an interesting new dimension to the problem that is likely to find important applications in the future.

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