Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

\(\uptau \)OWL: A Systematic Approach to Temporal Versioning of Semantic Web Ontologies

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Journal on Data Semantics

Abstract

The W3C OWL 2 recommendation is an ontology language for the Semantic Web. It allows defining both schema (i.e., entities, axioms, and expressions) and instances (i.e., individuals) of ontologies. However, OWL 2 lacks explicit support for time-varying schema or for time-varying instances. Hence, knowledge engineers or maintainers of semantics-based Web resources have to use ad hoc techniques to specify OWL 2 time-varying ontologies. In this paper, for a disciplined and systematic approach to the temporal management of Semantic Web ontologies, we propose the adoption of a framework called temporal OWL 2 (\(\uptau \)OWL), which is inspired by the \(\uptau \)XSchema framework defined for XML data. In a way similar to what happens in \(\uptau \)XSchema, \(\uptau \)OWL allows creating a temporal OWL 2 ontology from a conventional (i.e., non-temporal) OWL 2 ontology and a set of logical and physical annotations. Logical annotations identify which elements of the ontology can vary over time; physical annotations specify how the time-varying aspects are represented in the OWL 2 document. Using annotations to integrate temporal aspects in the traditional Semantic Web, our framework (1) guarantees logical and physical data independence for temporal schemas and (2) provides a low-impact solution, since it requires neither modifications of existing Semantic Web ontologies, nor extensions to the OWL 2 recommendation and Semantic Web standards. Moreover, since the conventional schema and annotation documents could evolve over time to respond to new applications’ requirements, \(\uptau \)OWL supports temporal schema versioning by allowing changing these components and by keeping track of their evolution through the conventional schema versions and annotation document versions, respectively. Two complete sets of operations are proposed for changing the conventional schema and annotation documents; to complete the figure, a set of operations is also introduced for updating temporal schema which must be changed consequently each time one of the mentioned components evolves over time. To show the feasibility of our approach, a prototype tool, named \(\uptau \)OWL-Manager, is presented.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13
Fig. 14
Fig. 15
Fig. 16
Fig. 17
Fig. 18
Fig. 19
Fig. 20
Fig. 21
Fig. 22
Fig. 23
Fig. 24

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. http://www.heppnetz.de/ontologies/goodrelations/v1. [retrieved: April, 2016].

  2. http://www.bestbuy.com/ [retrieved: April, 2016].

References

  1. Anagnostopoulos E, Batsakis S, Petrakis EGM (2013) CHRONOS: a reasoning engine for qualitative temporal information in OWL. In: Proceedings of the \(17^{{\rm th}}\) international conference in knowledge-based and intelligent information and engineering systems (KES 2013), Kitakyushu, Japan, 9–11 September, pp 70–77

  2. Bedi P, Marwaha S (2007) Versioning OWL ontology using temporal tags. In: Proceedings of the \(21^{{\rm st}}\) international conference on computer, electrical, systems science and engineering (CESSE’07), Vienna, Austria, 25–27 May, pp 332–337

  3. Berners-Lee T, Cailliau R, Luotonen A, Nielsen HF, Secret A (1994) The World Wide Web. Commun ACM 37(8):76–82

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Berners-Lee T, Hendler J, Lassila O (2001) The semantic web. Sci Am 284(5):34–43

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Brahmia Z, Grandi F, Oliboni B, Bouaziz R (2014a) Schema change operations for full support of schema versioning in the \(\tau \)XSchema framework. Int J Inf Technol Web Eng 9(2):20–46

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Brahmia Z, Grandi F, Oliboni B, Bouaziz R (2014b) High-level operations for changing temporal schema, conventional schema and annotations, in the \(\tau \)XSchema framework. Technical Report TR-96, TimeCenter, 56 pp, January. http://timecenter.cs.aau.dk/TimeCenterPublications/TR-96.pdf. (retrieved: April, 2016)

  7. Brahmia Z, Grandi F, Oliboni B, Bouaziz R (2015) Schema versioning. In: Khosrow-Pour M (ed) Encyclopedia of information science and technology, 3rd edn. IGI Global, Hershey, PA, pp 7651–7661. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-5888-2.ch754

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  8. Burns T, Fong E, Jefferson D, Knox R, Mark L, Reedy C et al (1986) Reference model for DBMS standardization, database architecture framework task group (DAFTG) of the ANSI/X3/SPARC database system study group. SIGMOD Rec 15(1):19–58

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Currim F, Currim S, Dyreson CE, Snodgrass RT (2004) A tale of two schemas: creating a temporal XML schema from a snapshot schema with tXSchema. In: Proceedings of the \(9^{{\rm th}}\) international conference on extending database technology (EDBT) 2004, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, 14–18 March, pp 348–365

  10. Dyreson CE, Grandi F (2009) Temporal XML. In: Liu L, Özsu MT (eds) Encyclopedia of database systems. Springer, US, pp 3032–3035

    Google Scholar 

  11. Grandi F (2002) A relational multi-schema data model and query language for full support of schema versioning. In: Proceedings of SEBD 2002—national conference on advanced database systems, Isola d’Elba, Italy, 19–21 June, pp 323–336

  12. Grandi F (2009) Multi-temporal RDF ontology versioning. In: Proceedings of the \(3^{{\rm rd}}\) international workshop on ontology dynamics (IWOD 2009), Washington DC, USA, 26 October. CEUR workshop proceedings (CEUR-WS.org), vol 519. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-519/grandi.pdf. (retrieved: April, 2016)

  13. Grandi F, Scalas MR (2009) The valid ontology: a simple OWL temporal versioning framework. In: Proceedings of the \(3^{{\rm rd}}\) international conference on advances in semantic processing (SEMAPRO 2009), Sliema, Malta, 11–16 October, pp 98–102

  14. Grandi F (2010) T-SPARQL: a TSQL2-like temporal query language for RDF. In: Proceedings of the \(1^{{\rm st}}\) international workshop on querying graph structured data (GraphQ 2010), Novi Sad, Serbia, 20 September, pp 21–30

  15. Grandi F (2011) Light-weight ontology versioning with multi-temporal RDF schema. In: Proceedings of the \(5^{{\rm th}}\) international conference on advances in semantic processing (SEMAPRO 2011), Lisbon, Portugal, 20–25 November, pp 42–48

  16. Grandi F (2012) An annotated bibliography on temporal and evolution aspects in the semantic web. SIGMOD Rec 41(4):18–21

  17. Grandi F (2013) Dynamic multi-version ontology-based personalization. In: Proceedings of the \(2^{{\rm nd}}\) international workshop on querying graph structured data (GraphQ 2013), Genoa, Italy, 22 March, pp 224–232

  18. Grandi F (2016) Dynamic class hierarchy management for multi-version ontology-based personalization. J Comput Syst Sci 82(1):69–90

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  19. Guarino N (ed) (1998) Formal ontology in information systems. IOS Press, Amsterdam

    Google Scholar 

  20. Gutiérrez C, Hurtado CA, Vaisman AA (2007) Introducing time into RDF. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 19(2):207–218

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Heflin J, Pan Z (2004) A model theoretic semantics for ontology versioning. In: Proceedings of the \(3^{{\rm rd}}\) international semantic web conference (ISWC 2004), Hiroshima, Japan, 7–11 November, pp 62–76

  22. Horridge M, Bechhofer S (2011) The OWL API: a Java API for OWL ontologies. Semant Web 2:11–21

    Google Scholar 

  23. Jaziri W, Sassi N, Gargouri F (2010) Approach and tool to evolve ontology and maintain its coherence. Int J Metadata Semant Ontol 5(2):151–166

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Kondylakis H, Plexousakis D (2013) Ontology evolution without tears. J Web Semant 19:42–58

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Milea V, Frasincar F, Kaymak U (2012) tOWL: a temporal web ontology language. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern Part B 42(1):268–281

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Motik B (2010) Representing and querying validity time in RDF and OWL: a logic-based approach. In: Proceedings of the \(9^{{\rm th}}\) international semantic web conference (ISWC 2010), Shanghai, China, 7–11 November, pp 550–565

  27. O’Connor MJ, Das AK (2011) A method for representing and querying temporal information in OWL. Biomedical engineering systems and technologies, volume 127 of communications in computer and information science. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, pp 97–110

    Google Scholar 

  28. Rogozan D, Paquette G (2005) Managing ontology changes on the semantic web. In: Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on web intelligence (WI 2005), Compiegne, France, 19–22 September, pp 430–433

  29. Sassi N, Jaziri W, Alharbi S (2015) Supporting ontology adaptation and versioning based on a graph of relevance. J Exp Theor Artif Intell. doi:10.1080/0952813X.2015.1056239

  30. Snodgrass RT, Dyreson CE, Currim F, Currim S, Joshi S (2008) Validating quicksand: schema versioning in \(\tau \)XSchema. Data Knowl Eng 65(2):223–242

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Völkel M, Groza T (2006) SemVersion: an RDF-based ontology versioning system. In: Proceedings of the IADIS international conference on WWW/Internet (ICWI 2006), Murcia, Spain, 5–8 October, vol 1, pp 195–202. http://www.xam.de/2006/10-SemVersion-ICIW2006.pdf. (retrieved: April, 2016)

  32. W3C (2004a) XML schema part 0: primer second edition. W3C Recommendation, 28 October 2004. http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xmlschema-0-20041028/. (retrieved: April, 2016)

  33. W3C (2004b) RDF/XML syntax specification (Revised). W3C Recommendation, 10 February 2004. http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-syntax-grammar-20040210/. (retrieved: April, 2016)

  34. W3C (2011) XQuery update facility 1.0. W3C Candidate Recommendation, 17 March 2011. http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/REC-xquery-update-10-20110317/. (retrieved: April, 2016)

  35. W3C (2012a) OWL 2 web ontology language—primer (2nd Edition). W3C Recommendation, 11 December 2012. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-primer/. (retrieved: April, 2016)

  36. W3C (2012b) OWL 2 web ontology language—document overview (2nd Edition). W3C Recommendation, 11 December 2012. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview/. (retrieved: April, 2016)

  37. W3C (2012c) OWL 2 web ontology language—new features and rationale (2nd Edition). W3C Recommendation, 11 December 2012. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-new-features/. (retrieved: April, 2016)

  38. Zablith F, Antoniou G, d’Aquin M, Flouris G, Kondylakis H, Motta E et al (2015) Ontology evolution: a process-centric survey. Knowl Eng Rev 30(1):45–75

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Zamborlini V, Guizzardi G (2010) On the representation of temporally changing information in OWL. In: Workshops proceedings of the \(14^{{\rm th}}\) IEEE international enterprise distributed object computing conference (EDOCW 2010), Vitória, Brazil, 25–29 October, pp 283–292

  40. Zekri A, Brahmia Z, Grandi F, Bouaziz R (2014) \(\tau \)OWL: a framework for managing temporal semantic web documents. In: Proceedings of the \(8^{{\rm th}}\) international conference on advances in semantic processing (SEMAPRO 2014), Rome, Italy, 24–28 August, pp 33–41

  41. Zekri A, Brahmia Z, Grandi F, Bouaziz R (2015a) \(\tau \)OWL: a framework for managing temporal semantic web documents supporting temporal schema versioning. Int J Adv Softw 8(1&2):85–102 (IARIA)

  42. Zekri A, Brahmia Z, Grandi F, Bouaziz R (2015b) Temporal schema versioning in \(\tau \)OWL. In:Proceedings of the \(2^{{\rm nd}}\) international conference on knowledge management, information and knowledge systems (KMIKS 2015), Hammamet, Tunisia, 16–18 April, pp 81–92

  43. Zekri A, Brahmia Z, Grandi F, Bouaziz R (2015c) \(\tau \)OWL-Manager: a tool for managing temporal semantic web documents in the \(\tau \)OWL framework. In: Proceedings of the \(9^{{\rm th}}\) international conference on advances in semantic processing (SEMAPRO 2015), Nice, France, 19–24 July, pp 56–64

  44. Zekri A, Brahmia Z, Grandi F, Bouaziz R (2016) Temporal schema versioning in \(\tau \)OWL: a systematic approach for the management of time-varying knowledge. Accepted for publication on Journal of Decision Systems

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia

    Abir Zekri, Zouhaier Brahmia & Rafik Bouaziz

  2. Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Fabio Grandi

Authors
  1. Abir Zekri
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Zouhaier Brahmia
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Fabio Grandi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Rafik Bouaziz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zouhaier Brahmia.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Zekri, A., Brahmia, Z., Grandi, F. et al. \(\uptau \)OWL: A Systematic Approach to Temporal Versioning of Semantic Web Ontologies. J Data Semant 5, 141–163 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13740-016-0066-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13740-016-0066-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation