Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-08-04 Abstract

Evolva: Towards Automatic Ontology Evolution
Techreport ID: kmi-08-04
Date: 2008
Author(s): Fouad Zablith

Ontologies form the core of Semantic Web systems, and as such, they need to evolve to meet the changing needs of the system and its users. Information is exponentially increasing in organizations' intranets as well as on the web, especially with the increased popularity of tools facilitating content generation such as wikis, blogs and social software. In such dynamic environments, evolving ontologies should be agile, i.e. with the least knowledge experts' input, for reflecting fast changes occurring in repositories, and keeping Semantic Web systems up-to-date. Most of current ontology evolution frameworks mainly rely on user input throughout their evolution process. We propose Evolva, an ontology evolution framework, aiming to substantially reduce or even eliminate user input through exploiting various background knowledge sources. Background knowledge exists in various forms including lexical databases, web pages and Semantic Web ontologies. Evolva has five main components: information discovery, data validation, ontological changes, evolution validation and evolution management. We present in this report an overview of the current work on ontology evolution, followed by our ontology evolution approach and pilot study conducted so far, and we finally conclude with a discussion and our future directions.

Future Internet

Knowledge
Management Multimedia &
Information Systems Narrative
Hypermedia New Media Systems Semantic Web &
Knowledge Services

Future Internet is...

With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection