Collaborative Ontology Evolution and Data Quality - An Empirical Analysis

Since more than a decade, theoretical research on ontology evolution has been published in literature and frameworks for managing ontology changes have been developed. However, there are less studies that analyze widely used ontologies developed in a collaborative manner to understand community-driven ontology evolution in practice. In this paper, we perform an empirical analysis on how four well-known ontologies (DBpedia, Schema.org, PROV-O, and FOAF) have evolved through their lifetime and an analysis of the data quality issues caused by some of the ontology changes.