Modeling Concept Evolution: A Historical Perspective

The world is changing, and so must the data that describes its history. Not surprisingly, considerable research effort has been spent in Databases along this direction, covering topics such as temporal models and schema evolution. A topic that has not received much attention, however, is that of concept evolution. For example, Germany (instance-level concept) has evolved several times in the last century as it went through different governance structures, then split into two national entities that eventually joined again. Likewise, a caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly, while a mother becomes two (maternally-related) entities. As well, the concept of Whale (a class-level concept) changed over the past two centuries thanks to scientific discoveries that led to a better understanding of what the concept entails. In this work, we present a formal framework for modeling, querying and managing such evolution. In particular, we describe how to model the evolution of a concept, and how this modeling can be used to answer historical queries of the form “How has concept X evolved over period Y”. Our proposal extends an RDF-like model with temporal features and evolution operators. Then we provide a query language that exploits these extensions and supports historical queries.