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 snapshots. The result is an efficient ontology temporal versioning solution, relying on standard XML technology.