OM4OV: Leveraging Ontology Matching for Ontology Versioning

Due to the dynamic nature of the Semantic Web, version control is necessary to manage changes in widely used ontologies. Despite the long-standing recognition of ontology versioning (OV) as a crucial component of efficient ontology management, many approaches treat OV as similar to ontology matching (OM) and directly reuse OM systems for OV tasks. In this study, we systematically analyse similarities and differences between OM and OV and formalise the OM4OV pipeline to offer more advanced OV support. The pipeline is implemented and evaluated in the state-of-the-art OM system Agent-OM. The experimental results indicate that OM systems can be reused for OV tasks, but without necessary extensions, the current OM4OV pipeline can produce skewed measurements, poor performance in detecting update entities, and limited explainability of false mappings. To tackle these issues, we propose an optimisation method called the cross-reference (CR) mechanism, which builds on existing OM alignments to reduce the number of matching candidates and to improve overall OV performance.