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Abstract: Knowledge constantly grows in scientific discourse and is revised over time by different stakeholders, either collaboratively or through institutionalized efforts. The body of knowledge gets structured and refined as the Communities of Practice concerned with a field of knowledge develop a deeper understanding of the issues. As a result, the knowledge model moves from a loosely clustered terminology to a semi-formal or even formal ontology. Change history management in such evolving knowledge models is an important and challenging task. Different techniques have been introduced in the research literature to solve the issue. A comprehensive solution must address various multi-faceted issues, such as ontology recovery, visualization of change effects, and keeping the evolving ontology in a consistent state. More so because the semantics of changes and evolution behavior of the ontology are hard to comprehend. This paper introduces a change history management framework for evolving ontologies; developed over the last couple of years. It is a comprehensive and methodological framework for managing issues related to change management in evolving ontologies, such as versioning, provenance, consistency, recovery, change representation and visualization. The Change history log is central to our framework and is supported by a semantically rich and formally sound change representation scheme known as change history ontology. Changes are captured and then stored in the log in conformance with the change history ontology. The log entries are later used to revert ontology to a previous consistent state, and to visualize the effects of change on ontology during its evolution. The framework is implemented to work as a plug-in for ontology repositories, such as Joseki and ontology editors, such as Protege. The change detection accuracy of the proposed system Change Tracer has been compared with that of Changes Tab, Version Log Generator in Protege; Change Detection, and Change Capturing of NeOn Toolkit. The proposed system has shown better accuracy against the existing systems. A comprehensive evaluation of the methodology was designed to validate the recovery operations. The accuracy of Roll-Back and Roll-Forward algorithms was conducted using different versions of SWETO Ontology, CIDOC CRM Ontology, OMV Ontology, and SWRC Ontology. Experimental results and comparison with other approaches shows that the change management process of the proposed system is accurate, consistent, and comprehensive in its coverage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Most healthcare data are available in XML format, which mainly focuses on the structure level and lacks support for data representation. Therefore, a variety of medical applications and medical semantic search engines have difficulty understanding and integrating healthcare data in a highly heterogeneous environment. OWL (Web Ontology Language) and Semantic Web technologies provide an infrastructure that can solve these problems. The aim of our study is to present a mechanism to ease the interpretation and automate the semantic transformation of XML healthcare data into the OWL ontology (S-Trans), which allows an easier and better semantic communication among hospital information systems. On the basis of the XML schemas (XSD or DTD), we extract the document structure and add more descriptions for XML elements. Moreover, to classify the semantic level of duplicate elements in an XML schema, we propose novel metrics to measure the similarity between them. Experimental results show that the proposed method reliably predicts semantic similarity of duplicates and produces a better-quality OWL ontology. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Mappings are established among ontologies for resolving the terminological and conceptual incompatibilities among information networks and information systems. Accommodating new knowledge in domain ontology causes the ontology to change from one consistent state to another. This consequently makes existing mappings among ontologies unreliable and stale due to the changes in resources. Mapping evolution eliminates discrepancies in the existing mappings. The proposed approach offers the benefits of re-establishing mappings among the updated ontologies in less time than is required with existing systems. It only considers the changed resources and eliminates staleness from the mappings. This approach uses the change history to drastically reduce the time required for reconciling mappings among ontologies, as shown in the results. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]