OM4OV: Leveraging Ontology Matching for Ontology Versioning

Abstract: Due to the dynamic nature of the Semantic Web, version control is necessary to capture time-varying information, particularly for widely used ontologies. Despite the long-standing recognition of ontology versioning (OV) as a crucial component for efficient ontology management, the growing size of ontologies and accumulating errors caused by manual labour overwhelm current OV approaches. In this paper, we propose a fresh approach to performing OV using existing ontology matching (OM) techniques and systems. We introduce a unified OM4OV pipeline. From an OM perspective, we reconstruct a new task formulation and measurements for OV tasks. Building upon the prior alignment(s) from OM, we propose a pipeline optimisation method called the cross-reference (CR) mechanism to enhance overall OV performance. We experimentally validate the OM4OV pipeline and the cross-reference mechanism in an OV testbed originating from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) datasets. We also discuss insights into OM used for OV tasks, where some apparent false mappings detected by OV systems are not actually untrue.