Semantic Recognition of Ontology Refactoring

Ontologies are used for sharing information and are often collaboratively developed. They are adapted for different applications and domains resulting in multiple versions of an ontology that are caused by changes and refactorings. Quite often, ontology versions (or parts of them) are syntactical very different but semantically equivalent. While there is existing work on detecting syntactical and structural changes in ontologies, there is still a need in analyzing and recognizing ontology changes and refactorings by a semantically comparison of ontology versions. In our approach, we start with a classification of model refactorings found in software engineering for identifying such refactorings in OWL ontologies using DL reasoning to recognize these refactorings.