Dynamic ontology version control

Abstract

Ontologies are used today in many application areas. With the use of ontologies in bioinformatics, as well as their use in semantic web technologies, ontology based software has become widely used. This has led to a need for keeping track of different ontology versions [8], as the operation of software will change as the ontologies it uses change. However, existing approaches to ontology versioning have worked on static ontologies. Thus, the ontology version that a software package will use must be chosen prior to running that package. This requires substantial human oversight, and is therefore a major limitation. In this paper, we examine a dynamic approach to ontology versioning that will automatically provide the correct ontology for a software package on-the-fly. We examine a methodology that employs storing different time stamped ontologies in the same file, and we discuss how this methodology can be used on a real ontology.