Representation And Verification Of Ontology Evolution

As a popular knowledge representation tool on the Internet, ontology has been widely used in various fields such as genetic engineering, biological engineering, aerospace, and others. Well-known ontologies, such as the NCI thesaurus, the medical and clinical terminology systematic terminology SNOMED CT,the Gene Ontology GO, the Anatomy basic model FMA and so on, are almost all large ontologies with complex structure. For instances, both NCI and FMA have about70,000concepts while SNOMED CT contains even more than300,000concepts. At the same time, such ontologies are continuously evolving.F or example, each month about900changes happen in the NCI ontology.The evolution of these ontologies constitutes the main rhythm of ontology engineering. In order to ensure the consistency before and after the ontology evolution, a large number of human and material resources have been devoted to the maintenance and management of ontology evolution. Scholars have realized the significance of this problem, and started to focus on the design and implementation of automated or semi-automatic platforms for the management of ontology evolution.The study on the nature of ontology evolution itself is also greatly valued. Currently, the relatively widely accepted ontology evolution process can be divided into six stages, including the capture of changes, the representation of changes, the semantics of changes, change implementation, the spread of the changes and the confirmation of the changes. Among these, representation of the change is the core of the whole evolution process. Formal, unambiguous, and machine able representation is the base of the formal semantics of changes, and makes it possible for the machine to process the capture, dissemination and confirm of the changes automatically. This will greatly reduce the work of domain experts and the burden of the computer maintenance and management personnel. This paper firstly analyzes the representation of the changes in the existing ontology evolution studies, especially several process-based formal representation based on the Pi-calculus. The pros and cons of such methods have been clarified as the theoretical foundation prepared for a better formal method. Secondly, this paper presents an improved formal representation of ontology evolution changes. According to the ontology structuresrelated to the changes, the changes of states of entities in the ontology have been analyzed with a deterministic finite automaton. The changes are intuitively taken as the spontaneous process of the entities. With the state automaton, the concept of communication semantics is proposed and the changes are translated as the information exchange among the changing entities. Thirdly, the semantics of the changes are classified, and modeled as the information exchange based on the process calculus with a formal description for the exchange of information with the expressiveness of the calculus. Finally, typical changes are exploited as case studies to complete a thorough validation of the proposed formal methods based on the MWB mobile work platform. The experimental results show that this method is feasible by circulating the close character of the process calculus in adding new process.In this paper, an improved formal method of the ontology evolution changes has been proposed on top of the existing solutions. The deficiencies in the post methods are fixed, andresults in a formal description of the communication semantics of ontology evolution as a meaningful attempt in the research of ontology evolution. Of course, the present work is still preliminary. Problems such as the spreading effects of theontology evolution are not been considered which can be interesting future works to be continued.