Revisiting Ontology Evolution Patterns

Mixing formal methods (such as B) and ontology description languages is a promising approach to develop reliable, safe and secure systems. In fact, both techniques have demonstrated their strengths to handle ambiguity, inconsistency and incompleteness of requirements. However, domain knowledge evolves continuously throughout the application life-cycle and hence different change requirements must be addressed. Several problems have to be managed in the ontology evolution process particularly change impact analysis and resolution. Among existing works, pattern-driven techniques have been proposed to provide guidance during the ontology evolution so that it remains consistent. The underlying process is often informal and mostly methodological; and consequently automation efforts are still required. In this paper, we propose a lightweight pattern-driven approach built on an executable formal definition of the Ontology Web Language (OWL), that we call xOWL. In order to ensure the execution, the debugging and the correctness of existing patterns, we instrumented xOWL using the B method and the Meeduse language workbench.