A Method to Guarantee Ontology Consistency on Property Range Changes

An important target in ontology evolution is to guarantee ontology consistency when changes occur. Most of previous work focused on providing general methods for handling abstract changes, but ignored detailed methods for the specific changes, especially those property range changes which often arise in practice. This paper presents a process to apply a request change, by focusing on the specific case of request about modifying the range of property. We propose all the three situations of the property range change according to the relationship between the old range of property ´Rg´ and the new one ´Rg₁´. The three situations contain Rg₁ includes Rg, Rg includes Rg1 and Rg doesnpsilat intersect with Rg₁. Each may influence different ontology entities and cause a special additional changes set to ensure the consistent state. An algorithm resolving these situations is proposed and implemented in our system. And a practical case study is presented.