Formal Operations for Ontology Evolution

Ontologies became more and more important for industrial usage one can see in projects like KAON [7] and KnowWork [15]. In this context ontologies will be continuously redesigned because of new market situations, restructuring of companies or because of increasing knowledge. Ontologies are used to represent the knowledge within these systems. For supporting the evolution of ontologies it is important to formalize the operations changing the knowledge base in order to get an explicit semantic for each operation. In this paper a basic technology for defining operations on ontologies on top of ALC [12] is introduced. An abstract data type knowledgebase is defined, which contains a description logic representation and a basic set of operations to work on it. These can be extendend or changed to satisfy local needs. It also leads to a formal introduction of operations for knowledge engineering, which can be used for ontology life-cycle management.