Change Management and Versioning in Ontologies

This document discusses change management and versioning in ontologies. It begins with definitions of ontologies and OWL. It then discusses why ontologies change due to domain changes, adaptations to applications, and changes in conceptualization. It provides examples of real-world ontology changes from UNSPSC. It discusses tracking changes through comparison and versioning. It presents a typology of generic and example ontology changes. It discusses practical change management processes and methods for naming, URIs, metadata, and change logs in ontology versioning. Finally, it summarizes some change-aware ontology tools and discusses open issues and conclusions.