Methods for Ontology Alignment Change

Abstract

Different repositories of ontology are available on the web to share common understandings of the knowledge of different domains with semantic web applications. They store, index, organize, and share ontologies and alignments between them that allow applications to search for and use the appropriate semantics on the fly. The quality of the ontologies and the alignments between them is a great challenge to guarantee the usefulness of ontology repositories. Like ontologies, alignments are subject to changes throughout their life cycle, which can decrease their quality. As a result, alignments must be evolved and maintained in order to keep up with the change in ontology or to meet the demands of applications and users. This chapter reviews and classifies the main ontology alignment change approaches. In addition, the chapter presents a new approach for the alignment change problem. The approach proposes a general framework that consists of a process of change. Various methods, each with a specific purpose, are proposed to automate and support the change process.