A formal description of ontology change in OWL

There are three main activities involved in managing ontology change. Firstly we need to identify changes, secondly describe these identified changes, and finally describe and handle the ramifications of the changes. In previous work we have presented a language (DOWL) for describing ontology change and in this paper we demonstrate how changes described in this language can be represented in the RDF abstract syntax which enables us to describe the ramifications of a change in a formal manner. This formalism can provide the basis for an automated ontology change management system. © 2005 IEEE.