Extension of Protege to Support Evolution of Ontology

Abstract

Ontology over a period of time needs to be modified to reflect changes in the real world, changes in the user’s requirements, and drawbacks in the initial design. The changes allow incorporating additional functionalities and ensuring incremental improvements. Although changes are inevitable during the development of ontology, most of the current ontology editors unfortunately do not provide enough support for efficient copying with changes. We have developed an extension of the Protégé editor for automatically supporting the evolution of ontologies and guiding users in performing other tasks for which their intervention are required. We present in this paper the extension of protégé and we show an application example for representing the Tunisian higher education system.