6533b82bfe1ef96bd128d2d6

RESEARCH PRODUCT

OntoVersionGraph : a change management methodology dedicated to formal ontologies and their user views in a collaborative context

subject

description

The world changes over time, impacting the knowledge of every subdomain it contains. Therefore systems describing the knowledge of a certain domain should be able to consider changes occurred to keep its knowledge representation up-to-date. Formal ontologies are one of them: they explicitly and formally represent the knowledge of a domain in all its forms and modes of existence. Collaboratively developed, a formal ontology allows the domain users to understand each other by sharing the same terminology despite the different assumptions they have on the domain conceptualization. However, due to its completeness, the complexity of its conceptualization can sometimes make the domain knowledge inaccessible for its users. Also domain users often need to access only a subset of this knowledge. Light sub-portions of the ontology or views defined by their assumptions should then be produced to provide domain users a personalized and comprehensive view of the domain knowledge described by the ontology. Considering such ontology, the world changes may impact both domain knowledge and users assumptions and their application can turn inconsistent the knowledge represented by the ontology and its views. However, an inconsistent ontology is no longer usable by the domain community. Ontology change management should ensure maintaining its consistency, so that its users can continue to cooperate and understand each other. Also, a formal ontology requires a collaborative development to take into account every domain user assumption, so does its change management. The problem is the following: how to enable collaborative ontology change management considering changes in the domain and new domain users assumptions? Until now, existing research in the Semantic Web does not allow such change management for formal ontologies. The contribution of my thesis therefore consists in designing an approach to ontology change management dedicated to formal ontologies enabling: the specification of ontology views based on new domain users assumptions, the consistent collaborative evolution of the ontology and its views, and the change impact management between them.