A framework for change impact analysis of ontology-driven content-based systems

Abstract

The trend in content-based systems (CBSs) is shifting towards the use of ontologies to semantically enrich the content and increase its accessibility. The growing need of semantically rich content becomes a driving force for building ontology-driven content-based systems (ODCBSs). The building blocks of ODCBSs are ontologies, content and annotations, forming a layered information model. In most ODCBSs, changes in the content, in the ontology or in the annotation are inevitable and are observed on a daily basis. Any change on one layer of the architecture has an impact within the layer and on the other layers. Impact analysis in large multi-ontology CBS is a manual, time consuming and labour intensive process. It is done only when it is necessary. Based on observation and empirical analysis, we propose a conceptual framework for dependency-based impact analysis and identify the possible impacts and their causes, the dependency among entities, their severity and factors affecting impact analysis process in ODCBSs. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.