Live Ontologies - Reasoning Support for the Development of Distributed and Dynamically Changing OWL Ontologies

• Applicant: Dr. Yevgeny Kazakov
• Subject Area: Theoretical Computer Science ; Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
• Term: from 2011 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 203848550

Logic-based ontology languages, such as OWL, are proliferating in many applications and application domains, particularly in biology and medicine. The success of OWL can be largely attributed to automated reasoning support, which can help analysing consequences of axioms in ontologies. Despite many advances in this area, reasoning support for the development of comprehensive ontologies, such as SNOMED CT is still limited. In particular, many complex aspects of ontology development have been largely ignored in the research. This project is concerned with studying ontology reasoning procedures that take these aspects into account: 1. Dealing with dynamically changing ontologies: how to perform standard reasoning tasks incrementally over changing ontologies by recomputing only results that depend on the changed input; 2. Reasoning support for collaborative ontology development: how to analyse the consequences of changes made by individual developers and make sure that the work of other developers remains unaffected; 3. Reasoning over distributed ontologies: how to perform local reasoning tasks when the ontology is distributed over several sites.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants