Ontology Evolution Using Ontology Templates

Evolving ontologies by domain experts is difficult and typically cannot be performed without the assistance of an ontology engineer. This process takes long time and often recurrent modeling errors have to be resolved. This paper proposes a technique for creating controlled ontology evolution scenarios that ensure consistency of the possible ontology evolution and give guarrantees to the domain expert that his/her updates do not cause inconsistency. We introduce ontology templates that formalize the notion of controlled evolution and define ontology template consistency checking service together with a consistency checking algorithm. We prove correctness and demonstate the practical use of the techniques in two scenarios.