Extending Description Logic for Reasoning about Ontology Evolution

Abstract

Ontologies play a key role in achieving global automatic information integration and sharing on the Semantic Web. They allow intelligent applications to exchange information through a shared and formal conceptualization of an application domain. Understanding ontology evolution can help both ontology developers and users evaluating the potential consequences of ontology changes and act accordingly. Our contribution is proposing a temporal paradigm for ontology evolution and extending Description Logic with Temporal Logic operators to formally characterize and reason about ontology evolution. We investigate related reasoning problems and algorithm.