Estratégia para evolução de ontologia: um estudo de caso na Biodiversidade

Abstract

Information and semantic interoperability between applications, systems and services, has contributed over the years to the growing use of ontologies, increasing the importance of maintaining these structures. Perform management of changes in order to make a comprehensive ontology to new contexts involves areas such as engineering, development, version control, merger, integration and ontologies maintenance. Changes in the ontology can arise for different reasons, such as, the domain has changed or its way of understanding has changed. Operate changes in an ontology is a crucial task, since consistency and coherence should always be kept, as well as conflict resolution and propagation of changes. There are some approaches in the literature for ontology evolution, but none of them uses expert tacit knowledge to support the evolution process. In this context, this research aims, through the use of experts’ mental models as a knowledge source, establish an architecture to ontology evolution, providing suggestions for change in question, and analyzing and creating a mapping model of these suggestions. Such strategy uses as a case study a formal ontology for the biodiversity domain. Furthermore, the domain ontology used was restructured to be applied to this strategy and an annotation scheme for the same has been developed. Moreover, as a preliminary assessment of investigation, the suggestions made will be applied in the ontology to consistency and coherence analysis