Section: New Results

Validation and Evolution of ISs and of Ontologies

Participant : Thierry Despeyroux.

To support the design, development and maintenance of complex but coherent sites we use Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence techniques as there is strong similarities between structured documents (such as Web sites) and programs.

Following previous experiments [68] we developed a new methodology for XML documents verification [8] . Nowadays, an IS does not only contain documents but it also makes references to ontologies, in particular in Semantic Web applications and ontologies engineering is now an important activity.

We make a parallel between ontologies and types in programming languages, and we use a small example to show that an ontology can be seen as a type system. When an ontology evolves, studying the impact of this evolution on the semantic annotations that use this ontology can be viewed as a type-checking process. First result has been published in [9] .

These results have been selected as a chapter of the book "Emergent Web Intelligence: Advanced Semantic Technologies" that will appear in April 2010 [67] .