Studying concept shift in political ontologies

For some years now ontologies have been used in Social Science, e.g., in the annotation of newspaper articles for disambiguating concepts within Media Analysis. The static view of those ontologies becomes problematic when they are associated with instances over distant years. These ontologies and annotations have now become objects of study in their own right, as they implicitly represent the shift of meaning of political concepts over time. In this paper, we address the problem of concept shifting from different aspects: extensional correlations between concepts from the same and different time periods, as well as intensional links, provided by hierarchical information and manually built links between concepts. We carry out an empirical study of concept shift in a case-study from Communication Science on a corpus with ontologies describing the Dutch election campaigns since 1994. Different types of concept shift are identified and the preliminary results lead to more open questions which needs to be investigated further.