Change Management for Metadata Evolution

In order to meet the demands of the Semantic Web, today’s ontologies need to be dynamic, networked structures. One important challenge, therefore, is to develop an integrated approach to the evolution process of ontologies and related metadata. Within this context, the specific goal of this work is to capture the evolution of metadata due to changed concepts, relations or metadata in one of the ontologies, and to capture changes to the ontology caused by changes to the metadata. After a short discussion of the nature of metadata, we propose a methodology to capture (1) the evolution of metadata induced by changes to the ontologies, and (2) the evolution of the ontology induced by changes to the underlying metadata. This will lead to the implementation of an approach for evolution of metadata related to ontologies.