Departement Informatica en Toegepaste Informatica

Abstract. To date, ontology research seems to have come to an equilib-rium: there is a wide variety of theories, methods and tools for extracting, representing, storing and browsing ontologies. Furthermore, ontologies have become an integral part of many academic and industrial applica-tions. There are, however, still deep theoretical problems to be resolved. One fundamental problem is ontology evolution. Essentially, changes oc-cur when new knowledge is agreed on by the (not necessarily human) cognitive agents. Each change engages an evolution process from which a new (possibly inconsistent) ontology version may emerge. How will we manage multiple versions of an ontology in a scalable fashion? How will we represent differences and transformations between ontologies, and moreover, can we solve this question independently from any ontology representation model? This paper describes a research project that will investigate all these critical problems in ontology evolution.