Towards Agile Ontology Maintenance

Ontologies are an appropriate means to represent knowledge on the Web. Research on ontology engineering methodologies has come from describing the scratch development of ontologies and reached practices for an integrative lifecycle support. The ontology engineering discipline has changed from an individual art towards a collaborative and distributed process with disparate skilled users develop consensual models and distributed networks of ontologies. However, a broader success of ontologies in Web-based information systems remains unreached. They gained momentum in some characteristic and closed domains, such as health care and life sciences. On the every-day Web the more lightweight semantic approaches are rather successful which are based upon small vocabularies, e.g. the emerging linked data initiative. But also this lightweight semantic cannot deploy its full potential. The Web 2.0 resulted huge so called data silos. By use of wrappers or crawlers huge RDF datasets are derived from the relational databases of such silos. Consolidating and integrating the whole data of a specific application-dependent purpose or a specific individual remains a cumbersome task. Not to mention the control of the unintegratedly evolving knowledge in the silos. As a next logical step one should await that, against the trend of the data silos, the user holds and controls her data on her own. Paired with the emerging trend of services and microservices on the Web [3] this results in a dynamic scenario in which a shared knowledge base is made available to several dynamically changing services with disparate requirements. This work envisions a step towards such a dynamic scenario in which an ontology adapts to the requirements of the accessing services and applications in an agile way. Therefore I design an innovative approach for agile ontology maintenance.