A Collaborative Development Environment for Ontologies (CODE)

Data and Knowledge Engineering, 2011

We propose a novel approach to facilitate the concurrent development of ontologies by different groups of experts. Our approach adapts Concurrent Versioning, a successful paradigm in software development, to allow several developers to make changes concurrently to an ontology. Conflict detection and resolution are based on novel techniques that take into account the structure and semantics of the ontology versions to be reconciled by using precisely-defined notions of structural and semantic differences between ontologies and by extending state-of-the-art ontology debugging and repair techniques. We also present ContentCVS, a system that implements our approach, and a preliminary empirical evaluation which suggests that our approach is both computationally feasible and useful in practice.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008

As knowledge engineering moves to the Semantic Web, ontologies become dynamic products of collaborative development rather than artifacts produced in a closed environment of a single research group. However, the projects differ-sometimes significantly-in the way the community members can contribute, the different roles they play, the mechanisms they use to carry out discussions and to achieve consensus. We are currently developing a flexible mechanism to support a wide range of collaborative workflows in the Protégé environment.

2009

OWL Ontologies are already being used in many application domains. In particular, OWL is extensively used in the clinical sciences; prominent examples of OWL ontologies are the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Thesaurus, SNOMED CT, the Gene Ontology (GO), the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA), and GALEN.

2021

Collaborative development of a shared or standardized ontology presents unique issues in workflow, version control, testing, and quality control. These challenges are similar to challenges faced in large-scale collaborative software development. We have taken this idea as the basis of a collaborative ontology development platform based on familiar software tools, including Continuous Integration platforms, version control systems, testing platforms, and review workflows. We have implemented these using open-source versions of each of these tools, and packaged them into a full-service collaborative platform for collaborative ontology development. This platform has been used in the development of FIBO, the Financial Industry Business Ontology, an ongoing collaborative effort that has been developing and maintaining a set of ontologies for over a decade. The platform is open-source and is being used in other projects beyond FIBO. We hope to continue this trend and improve the state of ...

Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 2011

This paper describes our methodological and technological approach for collaborative ontology development in interorganizational settings. It is based on the formalization of the collaborative ontology development process by means of an explicit editorial workflow, which coordinates proposals for changes among ontology editors in a flexible manner. This approach is supported by new models, methods and strategies for ontology change management in distributed environments: we propose a new form of ontology change representation, organised in layers so as to provide as much independence as possible from the underlying ontology languages, together with methods and strategies for their manipulation, version management, capture, storage and maintenance, some of which are based on existing proposals in the state of the art. Moreover, we propose a set of change propagation strategies that allow keeping distributed copies of the same ontology synchronized. Finally, we illustrate and evaluate our approach with a test case in the fishery domain from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The preliminary results obtained from our evaluation suggest positive indication on the practical value and usability of the work here presented.

Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, 2016

A Version Control System (VCS) is usually required for successful ontology development in distributed settings. VCSs enable the tracking and propagation of ontology changes, as well as collecting metadata to describe changes, e.g., who made a change at which point in time. Modern VCSs implement an optimistic approach that allows for simultaneous changes of the same artifact and provides mechanisms for automatic as well as manual conflict resolution. However, different ontology development tools serialize the ontology artifacts in different ways. As a consequence, existing VCSs may identify a huge number of false-positive conflicts during the merging process, i.e., conflicts that do not result from ontology changes but the fact that two ontology versions are differently serialized. Following the principle of prevention is better than cure, we designed SerVCS, an approach that enhances VCSs to cope with different serializations of the same ontology. SerVCS is based on a unique serialization of ontologies to reduce the number of false-positive conflicts produced whenever different serializations of the same ontology are compared. We implemented SerVCS on top of Git, utilizing tools such as Rapper and Rdf-toolkit for syntax validation and unique serialization, respectively. We have conducted an empirical evaluation to determine the conflict detection accuracy of SerVCS whenever simultaneous changes to an ontology are performed using different ontology editors. The evaluation results suggest that SerVCS empowers VCSs by preventing them from wrongly identifying serialization related conflicts.

2015

Enterprise integration carries the need for resolution of various semantic conflicts. These conflicts come in many forms and each of those may appear in a different context. Conflict detection and resolution can be made easier if a semantic description of the involved systems is available. We have developed a prototype, based on existing software Talend Open Studio ESB, for a framework where a user may attach an ontology to interface elements and have those interfaces mapped automatically. We present how this prototype was tested on a scenario for which a solution was previously developed manually at Model Labs GmbH/PI Informatik GmbH, Berlin.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

With the wider use of ontologies in the Semantic Web and as part of production systems, multiple scenarios for ontology maintenance and evolution are emerging. For example, successive ontology versions can be posted on the (Semantic) Web, with users discovering the new versions serendipitously; ontology-development in a collaborative environment can be synchronous or asynchronous; managers of projects may exercise quality control, examining changes from previous baseline versions and accepting or rejecting them before a new baseline is published, and so on. In this paper, we present different scenarios for ontology maintenance and evolution that we have encountered in our own projects and in those of our collaborators. We define several features that categorize these scenarios. For each scenario, we discuss the high-level tasks that an editing environment must support. We then present a unified comprehensive set of tools to support different scenarios in a single framework, allowing users to switch between different modes easily.

cs.vu.nl

The Knowledge Engineering Review, 2011

abstract={The workshop on Usage Analysis and the Web of Data (USEWOD2011) was the first workshop in the field to investigate combinations of usage data with semantics and the Web of Data. Questions the workshop aims to address are for example: How can semantics},