Mapping-chains for studying concept shift in political ontologies

For some years now ontologies have been used in Social Science, e.g., in annotation of newspaper articles for disambiguating concepts within Media Analysis. These ontologies and annotations have now become objects of study in their own right, as they implicitly represent the shift of meaning of political concept over time. Manual mappings, which are intrinsically intensional, can hardly capture such subtle changes, but we claim that automatic instance-based mappings, with their extensional character, are more suitable for producing interesting mapping-chains. In this paper, we evaluate the use of instance-based ontology mappings for producing concept chains in a case-study in Communication Science on a corpus with ontologies describing the Dutch election campaigns since 1994. This initial research shows the potential of the associative character of extensional mapping-chains, but also indicates a number of unsolved open questions, most significantly the lack of a proper methodology for evaluating such chains due to the open, explorative character of the task.