Bridging ontology evolution and belief change

Abstract

One of the crucial tasks towards the realization of the Semantic Web vision is the efficient encoding of human knowledge in ontologies. The proper maintenance of these, usually large, structures and, in particular, their adaptation to new knowledge (ontology evolution) is one of the most challenging problems in current Semantic Web research. In this paper, we uncover a certain gap in current ontology evolution approaches and propose a novel research path based on belief change. We present some ideas in this direction and argue that our approach introduces an interesting new dimension to the problem that is likely to find important applications in the future. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.