Ontology Evolution Issues in Adaptable Information Management Systems

Currently, ontology based information management systems have drawn great attentions. However, one of the challenges is how to manage the evolution of the ontology. If ontology evolution was not considered beforehand in the modeling phase of the system, then it may cause potential inconsistencies among the components of the ontology and the dependent applications. Besides the evolution of an ontology may interfere with the running of its dependent applications. Hence, in this paper the approaches of maintaining the consistency and keeping the continuousness of the dependent applications during the evolution are analyzed. Firstly, a virtual space based framework is put forward and most of the changes are to be made in the virtual space. Then two types of property changes are analyzed and solutions for processing them are given in detail. Besides, a register record approach is addressed for checking the dependency between the applications and the ontology schema.