Evordf: A Framework For Exploring Ontology Evolution

The evolution of ontologies is a reality in current research community. The problem of understanding and exploring this evolution is a fundamental problem as maintainers of depending artifacts need to take a decision about possible changes and ontology engineers need to understand the reasons for this evolution. Recent research focuses on identifying and statically visualizing deltas between ontology versions using various low- or high-level language of changes. In this paper, we argue that this is not enough and we provide a complete solution enabling the active, dynamic exploration of the evolution of RDF/S ontologies using provenance queries. To this direction, we construct an ontology of changes for modeling the language of changes and we store all changes as instances of this ontology in a triple store. On top of this triple store two visualization modules, one individual app and one protege plugin allow the exploration of the evolution using provenance queries. To the best of our knowledge our approach is unique in allowing the dynamic exploration of the evolution using provenance queries.