Abstract
To date, no ontology change management system exists that records the ontology changes based on the different levels of granularity. Once changes are performed using elementary level change operations, they are recorded in the database at the elementary level accordingly. Such a change representation procedure is not sufficient to represent the intuition behind any applied change and thus, cannot capture the semantic impact of a change. In this paper, we discuss recording of the applied ontology changes in the form of a layered change log. We support the implementation of a layered change operator framework through layered change logs. We utilize the lower level ontology change log in two ways, i.e. recording of applied ontology changes (operational) and mining of higher level change patterns (analytical). The higher level change logs capture the objective of the ontology changes at a higher level of granularity and support a comprehensive understanding of the ontology evolution. The knowledge-based change log facilitates the detection of similarities within different time series, mining of change patterns and reuse of knowledge.The layered change logs are formalised using a graph-based approach.