Ontologies are heavily developed and used in life sciences and undergo continuous changes. However, the evolution of life science ontologies and references to them (e.g., annotations) is not well understood and has received little attention so far. We therefore propose a generic framework for analyzing both the evolution of ontologies and the evolution of ontology-related mappings, in particular annotations referring to ontologies and similarity (match) mappings between ontologies. We use our framework for an extensive comparative evaluation of evolution measures for 16 life science ontologies. Moreover, we analyze the evolution of annotation mappings and ontology mappings for the Gene Ontology.

<a href = "http://dbs.uni-leipzig.de/ls_ontology_evolution">Detailed results of the analysis</a>

<h2 id="bibtex_heading">BibTex</h2>
<pre id="bibtex_listing">
@inproceedings{hartung_dils2008,
author = {Michael Hartung and
Toralf Kirsten and
Erhard Rahm},
title = {Analyzing the Evolution of Life Science Ontologies and Mappings},
booktitle = {DILS},
year = {2008},
pages = {11-27},
ee = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69828-9_4}
}
</pre>