Empirical analysis of impacts of instance-driven changes in ontologies

Abstract

Changes in the characterization of instances in digital content are one of the rationales to evolve ontologies that support a domain. These changes can have impacts on one or more of interrelated ontologies. Before implementing changes, their impact on the target ontology, other dependent ontologies or dependent systems should be analysed. We investigate three concerns for the determination of impacts of changes in ontologies: representation of changes to ensure minimum impact, impact determination and integrity determination. Key elements of our solution are the operationalization of changes to minimize impacts, a parameterization approach for the determination of impacts, a categorization scheme for identified impacts, and prioritization technique for change operations based on the severity of impacts. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.