2.3.1/Evolva

Evolva

The Evolva plugin is an ontology evolution tool, which evolves and extends ontologies by identifying new ontological entities from external data sources, and produces a new version of this ontology with the added changes. A key feature of Evolva is that it relies on background knowledge to link and evaluate entities to be added to the ontology. The user starts by selecting the ontology to evolve. Then a list of classes is visualised, with the ability for the user to select which concepts should be included in the evolution. This is helpful in case the user wants to evolve only part of a big ontology. The user then specifies the domain data source (e.g. text corpus) that Evolva processes and identifies new domain concepts with the ability to manually select or avoid the ones to potentially integrate in the ontology. Evolva exploits online ontologies and WordNet to identify links between new concepts and existing concepts in the ontology. Such links are displayed to the user in the form of statements, with the corresponding complete path derived from the source of background knowledge. The user than chooses the statements that needs to be added to the ontology, and finally decides if the changes should be applied directly on the ontology, or create a new detached version. The new ontology automatically appears in the NeOn Toolkit ontology editor, ready to be used.

In terms of the ontology engineering lifecycle, Evolva fits at the level of evolving and updating the ontology to keep it aligned with the represented domain. Ontology evolution being a tedious and time consuming task, our plugin aims to decrease the load and aid ontology maintainers responsible of such task. After having built a basic ontology, the ontology engineer can use Evolva to identify and integrate new concepts that arise in the domain during the ontology lifecycle, without having to go through existing data that describe the domain in the form of more traditional data representations such as text documents.