Ontologies are heavily developed and used in life sciences and undergo continuous changes. However, the evolution of life
science ontologies and references to them (e.g., annotations) is not well understood and has received little attention so
far. We therefore propose a generic framework for analyzing both the evolution of ontologies and the evolution of ontology-related
mappings, in particular annotations referring to ontologies and similarity (match) mappings between ontologies. We use our
framework for an extensive comparative evaluation of evolution measures for 16 life science ontologies. Moreover, we analyze
the evolution of annotation mappings and ontology mappings for the Gene Ontology.
Keywords Ontology evolution - ontology matching - mapping evolution