Title: Datatype evolution on RDF ontologies

Authors: Anastasia Analyti; Ioannis Pachoulakis

Addresses: Institute of Computer Science, FORTH-ICS, Crete, Greece ' Department of Informatics Engineering, TEI of Crete, Crete, Greece

Abstract: Semantic web ontologies are not static but evolve as the understanding of the domain (or the domain itself) grows or evolves. This evolution is usually independent of the ontological instance descriptions which are stored in knowledge bases (KBs). Therefore, the effects of an ontology update on instance descriptions which are migrated to a new ontology version should be studied. In this paper, we are interested in the effects of the migration of literal-valued instance triples of an RDF KB to a new ontology version. Note that the datatype of the property of such an instance description may have evolved in the new ontology version, e.g., from integer to decimal or from float to double. We manage the quality of these migrated instance triples and design flexible interactive methods through which the curator of the KB can intervene to correct the 'inaccuracies' of the literal values that are incurred by the migration process. In addition, specialised algorithms are presented, which are highly efficient, since their time and space complexity is linear with respect to the size of the literal-valued instance triples of the KB. Our work is particularly important to e-science applications that are commonly curated and have many datatype properties.

Keywords: datatype evolution; literal-valued instance triples; quality management; knowledge base curation; RDF ontologies; semantic web; resource description framework.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWET.2014.063040

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2014 Vol.9 No.1, pp.30 - 61

Published online: 30 Jul 2014 *

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