Dynamic change evaluation for ontology evolution in the semantic web

Changes in an ontology may have a disruptive impact on any system using it. This impact may depend on structural changes such as introduction or removal of concept defini-tions, or it may be related to a change in the expected per-formance of the reasoning tasks. As the number of systems using ontologies is expected to increase, and given the open nature of the Semantic Web, introduction of new ontologies and modifications to existing ones are to be expected. Dy-namically handling such changes, without requiring human intervention, becomes crucial. This paper presents a frame-work that isolates groups of related axioms in an OWL on-tology, so that a change in one or more axioms can be au-tomatically localised to a part of the ontology.