Managing Change History in Web Ontologies

Ontologies changes in the sense of constantly growing in scientific discourse and being revised over time by different people. It refers to the fact that groups of professionals over time (e.g. in a longer term project) develop a common understanding based on joint interpretation of a shared terminology. The terminology will get structured and refined as the Communities of Practice concerned with a field of knowledge develop a deeper understanding of issues, thus moving from a loosely clustered terminology to a semi-formal or even formal ontology.Keeping trail of these changes in semantically rich and formally sound mechanism, on one hand, has pragmatic advantages for providing the undo and redo facility and to recover to a previous state of ontology. On the other hand, it also contributes in understanding the change process and identifying the patterns of changes in the ontologies. This research aims at developing semantic structure for comprehensively storing ontology changes, and the application of the stored changes. For change history management in evolving ontologies, we have modeled an ontology for change history.