Understanding Ontology Evolution Beyond Deltas

The dynamic nature of the data on the Web gives rise to a multitude of problems related to the description and analysis of the evolution of such data. Traditional approaches for identifying and analyzing changes are descriptive, focusing on the provision of a “delta” that describes the changes and often overwhelming the user with loads of information. Here, we take an alternative approach which aims at giving a high-level overview of the change process and at identifying the most important changes in the ontology. For doing so, we consider different metrics of “change intensity”, taking into account the changes that affected each class and its neighborhood, as well as ontological information related to the importance and connectivity of each class in the different versions. We argue that this approach will allow a better understanding of the intent (rather than the actions) of the editor, and a better focusing of the curator analyzing the changes; traditional delta-based approaches can subsequently be used for a more fine-grained analysis.