Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 August 2018
Ontologies are constantly evolving as new requirements daily occur and the modeling choices of the past should be updated or adapted. Exploring this evolution will enhance the understanding, augmenting the exploitation potential of the available ontologies. However, recent research focuses mostly on detecting changes between ontology versions, overloading end-users with hundreds or even thousands of changes between ontology versions, making it impossible to explore this evolution. To this direction, in this paper, we present EvoRDF, a novel framework for exploring ontology evolution using provenance queries. Our approach uses a high-level language of changes and effectively answers queries about when a specific resource was introduced and how—by which change operations. Even more, why queries can identify the sequence of changes that led to the creation of a specific resource in the latest ontology version or track the evolution of a specific resource from a past ontology version. The evaluation performed shows the feasibility of our solution and the great advantages gained.