Versions and applicability of concept definitions in legal ontologies

In many domains concept definitions undergo change on a
relatively frequent basis. Especially in law, such changes can have far
reaching consequences. Existing ontology versioning techniques often do
not consider that old and new definitions may need to co-exist side by side
in a knowledge base, or they require non-standard language extensions.
In this paper we present a description logic based representation that
allows us to model and switch between varying definitions of concepts in
a single OWL ontology. We show how this representation can be used to
model complex versioning schemes in law.