A Timing Analysis Model for Ontology Evolutions Based on Distributed Environments

Abstract

In order to reuse and assess ontologies, it is critical for ontology engineers to represent and manage ontology versioning and evolutions. In this paper, we propose a timing analysis model for ontology evolution management with more expressive time constraints in a distributed environment. In the model, a timing change operation sequence is called a timing evolution behavior that must satisfy all of the time constraints in a distributed environment. Using this timing analysis model, we can detect whether ontology evolutions are timing consistent in the distributed environment. Given a timing change operation sequence, we also can detect whether it is a timing evolution behavior of the distributed environment. All of these detections can be reduced to detecting whether the group of inequations has solutions. This enables us to better manage dynamic versioning and evolutions of distributed ontologies. We also developed a prototype system called TEAM that can perform our timing analysis task of distributed ontology evolutions.