Data Migration for Ontology Evolution
摘要
Ontology is the conceptual backbone that provides meaning to data on the semantic web. However, ontology is not a static resource and may evolve over time, which often leaves the meaning of data in an undefined or inconsistent state. It is thus very important to have a method to preserve the data and its meaning when ontology changes. This paper proposed a general method that solves the problem using data migration. It analyzed some of the issues in the method including separation of ontology and data, migration specification, migration result and migration algorithm. The paper also instantiates the general mothod in RDF(S) as an example. The RDF(S) example itself is a simple but complete method for migrating RDF data when RDFS ontology changes.