Ontology evolution: a process-centric survey

Ontology evolution aims at maintaining an ontology up to date with respect to changes in the
domain that it models or novel requirements of information systems that it enables. The recent
industrial adoption of Semantic Web techniques, which rely on ontologies, has led to the increased
importance of the ontology evolution research. Typical approaches to ontology evolution are
designed as multiple-stage processes combining techniques from a variety of fields (e.g., natural
language processing and reasoning). However, the few existing surveys on this topic lack an
in-depth analysis of the various stages of the ontology evolution process. This survey extends the
literature by adopting a process-centric view of ontology evolution. Accordingly, we first provide
an overall process model synthesized from an overview of the existing models in the literature.
Then we survey the major approaches to each of the steps in this process and conclude on future
challenges for techniques aiming to solve that particular stage.