Mapping-chains for studying concept shift in political ontologies

For some years now ontologies have been used in Social Sci-ence,e.g., in annotation of newspaper articles for disambiguating con-cepts within Media Analysis. These ontologies and annotations have nowbecome objects of study in their own right, as they implicitly repre-sent the shift of meaning of political concept over time. Manual map-pings, which are intrinsically intensional, can hardly capture such subtlechanges, but we claim that automatic instance-based mappings, withtheir extensional character, are more suitable for producing interestingmapping-chains.In this paper, we evaluate the use of instance-based ontology mappingsfor producing concept chains in a case-study in Communication Scienceon a corpus with ontologies describing the Dutch election campaigns since1994. This initial research shows the potential of the associative characterof extensional mapping-chains, but also indicates a number of unsolvedopen questions, most significantly the lack of a proper methodology forevaluating such chains due to the open, explorative character of the task.