In this paper, we consider the problem of ontology evolution in the face of a change operation. We devise a general-purpose algorithm for determining the effects and side-effects of a requested elementary or complex change operation. Our work is inspired by belief revision principles (i.e., validity, success and minimal change) and allows us to handle any change operation in a provably rational and consistent manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach overcoming the limitations of existing solutions, which deal with each change operation on a per-case basis. Additionally, we rely on our general change handling algorithm to implement specialized versions of it, one per desired change operation, in order to compute the equivalent set of effects and side-effects.

This work was partially supported by the EU projects CASPAR (FP6-2005-IST-033572) and KP-LAB (FP6-2004-IST-27490).