To achieve improved availability and performance, often, local copies of remote data from autonomous sources are maintained. Web search engines are the primary examples of such services. Increasingly, these services are utilizing the Semantic Web as it is often envisioned as a machine-interpretable web. In order to keep the local repositories current, it is essential to synchronize their content with that of their original sources. Change detection is the first step to accomplish this. It is essential to have efficient change detection mechanisms as the size of the local repositories is often very large. In this paper, we present an approach that exploits the semantic relationships among the concepts in guiding the change detection process. Given changes to some seed instances, a reasoning engine fires a set of pre-defined rules to characterize the profile of the changed target instances. In addition to change detection, our proposed semantics-based approach of utilizing semantic associations can be utilized in other applications such as guiding information discovery for agents, consistency maintenance among distributed information sources, among others.
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