Versioning OWL Ontologies using Temporal Tags

Abstract

Ontologies play an important role in semantic web applications and are often developed by different groups and continues to evolve over time. The knowledge in ontologies changes very rapidly that make the pplications outdated if they continue to use old versions or unstable if they jump to new versions. Temporal frames using frame versioning and slot versioning are used to take care of dynamic nature of the ontologies. The paper proposes new tags and restructured OWL format enabling the applications to work with the old or new version of ontologies. Gene Ontology, a very dynamic ontology, has been used as a case study to explain the OWL Ontology with Temporal Tags.