Change Management for Distributed Ontologies
Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit, (September 2004)Abstract
The popularity of ontologies in computer science applications is steadily
increasing. Often, ontologies are developed by multiple independent
users at several locations. Successful application of ontologies
in these uncontrolled, de-centralized and distributed environments
requires substantial support for ontology change management. This
thesis starts with an investigation of the requirements for an ontology
change management methodology. The second part presents a framework
that consists of a general and concise specification for ontology
change and a number of process models that describe how a change
specification can be generated and used for different change management
tasks. The last part shows how the framework for change management
can be applied. It describes three tools that implement some of the
processes of the framework and three practical studies in which some
of the methods in the framework are applied in realistic settings.
