The Valid Ontology: A Simple OWL Temporal Versioning Framework

In this paper, we consider the problem of managing multiple temporal versions of an ontology. For example, in the legal and e-Government domains, temporal versions of an ontology are a natural consequence of the dynamics involved in normative systems. To this purpose, we introduce “The Valid Ontology” approach, by adapting to OWL-encoded ontologies a versioning scheme we proposed in the past for generic Web resources. In particular, we propose to use a single temporal XML document to represent and store a multi-version ontology and use a temporal XML query processor to efficiently extract valid OWL ontologies from the XML document as temporal shapshots