ChImp: Visualizing Ontology Changes and their Impact in Protégé

Today, ontologies are an established part of many applications and research. However, ontologies evolve over time, and ontology editors—engineers and domain experts—need to be aware of the con-sequences of changes while editing. Ontology editors might not be fully aware of how they are influencing consistency, quality, or the structure of the ontology, possibly causing applications to fail. To support editors and in crease their sensitivity towards the consequences of their actions, we conducted a user survey to elicit preferences for representing changes,e.g., with ontology metrics such as number of classes and properties.Based on the survey, we developed ChImp—a Protégé plug-in to display information about the impact of changes in real-time. During editing of the ontology, ChImp lists the applied changes, checks and displays the consistency status, and reports measures describing the effect on the structure of the ontology. Akin to software IDEs and integrated testing approaches, we hope that displaying such metrics will help to improve ontology evolution processes in the long run.