Citation
Palma, R. and Corcho, Oscar and Gómez-Pérez, A. and Haase, Peter
(2011).
A holistic approach to collaborative ontology development based on change management.
"Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web", v. 9
(n. 3);
pp. 299-314.
ISSN 1570-8268.
Abstract
This paper describes our methodological and technological approach for collaborative ontology development
in inter-organizational 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, organized 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.