Understanding and Supporting Ontology Evolution by Observing the WWW Conference
Proceedings of the International Workshop on Emergent Semantics and Ontology Evolution (ESOE2007) at ISWC/ASWC2007, Busan, South Korea, (November 2007)Abstract
Ontologies which represent domain knowledge in information systems are efficient to enhance information retrieval. However, domain knowledge is evolving over time and thus it should be also expressible at ontology level. Unfortunately, we consider that ontology evolution is barely study and its basic principles have not been yet precisely defined according to our notion of evolution. In this paper, we have followed a bottom-up approach consisting in a rigorous analysis of the evolution of a particular domain over a significant period of time (namely the WWW series of conference over a decade) to highlight concrete domain knowledge evolutions. We then have generalized and we present a precise set of evolution features that should be offered by ontology metamodels. We also evaluate the modelling capabilities of OWL to represent these features and finally, we show the contribution of ontology evolution support to improve Web information retrieval.