Impact of Agricultural Ontologies Evolution on the Alignment Preservative Adaptation

Abstract

Ontology matching techniques are a solution to surmount the problem of interoperability on the fly between ontologies. However, both alignments and ontologies are likely to be evolved throughout their life cycle, which frequently degrades their qualities. One of the main features of an alignment is its conservativity, so that it should never generate new knowledge compared to those generated by reasoning solely on ontologies. We focus in this paper on the issue of adapting the fresh alignment between evolved OWL-2 ontologies while respecting the conservativity principle. We also propose several patterns to deal with the problem of detection and repair of conservativity breaches during such evolution depending on the type of change in the related OWL-2 ontologies. We use famous ontologies from the field of agriculture to validate our experimentation. At the end we present a set of open research issues.