[Semantic Web]Changes in Ontologies

读书笔记 Lee 发表于 2006/3/8 23:35:40 According to Gruber (1993), an ontology is a specification of a conceptualization of a domain. Hence, changes in ontologies can be caused by either: changes in the domain;changes in the conceptualization;changes in the specification. Changes in the conceptualization are also happening frequently. It is important to realize that a shared conceptualization of a domain – which is a requirement for information exchange – is not a static specification that is produced once in the history, but has to be reached over time. Ontologies are described as dynamic networks of meaning, in which consensus is achieved in a social process of exchanging information and meaning. This view attributes a dual role to ontologies in information exchange: they provide consensus that is both a prerequisite for information exchange and a result of this exchange process. A conceptualization can also change because of the usage perspective. Different tasks may imply different views on the domain and consequently a different conceptualization. When an ontology is adapted for a new task or a new domain, the modifications represent changes to the conceptualization. Finally, a specification change is a kind of translation, that is, a change in the way in which a conceptualization is formally recorded. Although ontology translation is an important and non-trivial issue in many practical applications, it is less interesting from a change management perspective, for two reasons. First, an important goal of a translation is to retain the semantics, that is, specification variants should be equivalent4 and they thus only cause syntactic interoperability problems. Second, a translation is often created to use the ontology in an other context (i.e. an other application or system), which heavily reduces the importance of interoperability questions.

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