Change Tracer: Tracking Changes in Web Ontologies

Knowledge constantly grows in scientific discourse and is revised over time by domain experts. The body of knowledge will get structured and refined as the communities of practice concerned with the field of knowledge develop a deeper understanding of issues. The knowledge model, as a result evolves to a new state to accommodate the new knowledge. Keeping trail of these changes in semantically rich and formally sound mechanism, has pragmatic advantages for providing the undo and redo facility and recover to a previous state of the knowledge body (i.e. ontology). In this research, we have developed and tested comprehensive methodological framework for change tracer. The ontology changes are captured and then stored in change history log (CHL) in conformance to change history ontology (CHO). The CHL is later used for reverting ontology to a previous consistent state and visualization of change effects on ontology. The system is compared with ChangesTab of Protege, a comprehensive evaluation of the accuracy of roll-back and roll-forward algorithm has been conducted over documentation ontology. The system is also tested over a standard dataset of OMV and high accuracy results are observed for both roll-back and roll-forward algorithms.