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
KnowledgeManagementMultimedia &
Information SystemsNarrative
HypermediaNew Media SystemsSemantic Web &
Knowledge ServicesSocial Software
Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...
Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...
Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.
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