Managing change in ontologies

In this paper we present a study focusing on capturing the semantic structure and dynamic aspects of historical documents. To code the semantic structure of a document we adapted currently available methodologies for ontology engineering to the context of semantic document coding. We utilized an evolving methodology to design and build an ontology. The resulting methodology closely resembles an agile programming method. To capture the dynamicity of the knowledge within a historical document we embedded a time attribute to all elements of our ontology implementation. The temporal features of this ontology enhanced our semantic model and allowed us to capture the temporal dimension of the existing relations in historical documents. This temporal representation gives the relations more realism approaching that which they have in the real world. To ground our work, we applied the proposed methodology to encode a historical document covering the evolution of the constitution of modern Iran [A. Kasravi, (1940)]. We suggest that the proposed methodology applies equally well to a similar class of documents and that our ontological model can be generalized to any document, which covers historical events in a similar manner.