Investigating the Impact of Changes on the Materialisation (multiple projects)

Supervisor: Romana Pernisch (r.pernisch@vu.nl)

Background

Updates on ontologies affect the operations built on top of them. But not all changes are equal: some updates drastically change the result of operations; others lead to minor variations, if any. We previously proposed a number of measures to quantify the impact of changes on the materialisation (reasoning, making inmplicit information within the ontology explicit), but our investigation was limited to only biomedical ontologies.

Description

In this theses, we wand to investigate the impact of materialisation on more expressive ontologies as well as dive deeper into the effect of individual changes. We also want to propose additional measure that would present more localized impact rather then taking the materialised ontology as a whole. Lastly, we want to investigate the possibility of using features form the ontology to predict or approximate the impact of changes, rather than calculating it, to address scalability.

This topic contains multiple thesis topics and these are the different parts that individual students can choose to work on:

• In-depth analysis/investigation of the influence on the materialisation by different types of changes
• Definition of a localised impact measure to address scalability
• Approximation or estimation of the impact without calculating the materialisation
• Investigation of more expressive ontologies and the impact of changes (OWL DL, OWL full, etc.)

Literature

• Beware of the hierarchy — An analysis of ontology evolution and the materialisation impact for biomedical ontologies [paper]