Ontology Modification in a Multi-User Concept - Conflict Resolution

International audienceThe task of ontology evolution has been a topic of several research works leading to a number of tools facilitating the process of ontology evolution. These tools often propose different approaches without taking into account the multi-user context. It is either assumed that an ontology engineer changes the ontology, or that experts modify the ontology in asynchronous way. In this paper, we propose an approach to update ontologies for keeping knowledge up to date. This approach is based on agent’s paradigm. The relevance of agents is that they can interact with each other to assist the expert to upgrade dynamically knowledge. In multi-user context, experts are able to modify simultaneously the same ontological entity which can generate conflict situations in the system. This one could generate ontology inconsistency. To control the conflict situation each agent uses predefined rules