A conflict-resolving approach to ontology evolution in open environments

There is an increasing need for timely adaptation of an ontology to the arisen changes and the consistent propagation of these changes to dependent artifacts. This paper provides a careful analysis of the dynamic changing feature of ontology, and proposes a conflicting-resolving approach to handling ontology changes in open environments. To do so, we focus on ontology's concepts involved in ontology change sequences by using Argument Pools and Remove Pools, on which a concept conflict graph is used to analyze four kinds of relationship between two ontology change sequences. To consistently handle simultaneous ontology changes, a novel algorithm named ASMSOCSS is used to find all maximum and sequential ontology change sequence subset in the prime ontology change sequence set, and multiple independent ontology versions are produced when every maximum and sequential ontology change sequence set acts on the preliminary ontology. © 2010 CRL Publishing Ltd.