An Environment for Distributed Ontology Development Based on Dependency Management

Abstract

Abstract. This paper describes a system for supporting development of ontology in a distributed manner. By a distributed manner, we mean ontology is divided into several component ontologies, which are developed by different developers in a distributed environment. The target ontology is obtained by compiling the component ontologies. These component ontologies are identified according to their conceptual level or domain characteristics. The distributed development of ontologies applies to many situations such as cooperative development, reusing ontologies and so on. To support such a way of ontology development, we investigate the dependency between component ontologies and design some functions for management of these ontologies based on their dependencies. We next consider the influence of a change of one ontology to others through its dependencies and design a function to suggest a few candidate modifications of the influenced ontology for keeping the consistency. We also present some examples of how the system works.

A holistic approach to collaborative ontology development based on change management

“…Previous efforts to support collaborative ontology development produced relevant methodological and technological results (e.g., [7,4,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]). However, existing solutions support only a centralized management of the ontology and its related changes.…”

“…In some cases (e.g., [7] and [4]), a shared (aka. main) copy of the ontology can be adapted or specialized by distributed users; in other cases (e.g., [9] and [10]), a main copy of the ontology is divided into sub-ontologies each of them modified by distributed users; and in other cases (e.g., [8,[11][12][13]15]) there is only a central copy of the ontology that all distributed users can modify. In every case, changes are applied and managed in the central copy of the ontology.…”

“…With respect to the propagation of changes, it has only been considered in the past to related ontologies (e.g., [17,25] and [9]), to ontology individuals (e.g., [26,27]), and to some extent to related applications ( [28]). For the propagation of changes to related ontologies, existing approaches consider only a central (main) copy of the ontology that is either replicated (e.g., [17]) or divided into several component ontologies (e.g., [9]) and where in general, changes are propagated only in one direction: from the main copy to its replicas.…”

“…For the propagation of changes to related ontologies, existing approaches consider only a central (main) copy of the ontology that is either replicated (e.g., [17]) or divided into several component ontologies (e.g., [9]) and where in general, changes are propagated only in one direction: from the main copy to its replicas. The only exception is when the ontology is divided into several component ontologies, but in this case the management of changes is centralized.…”

A Holistic Approach to Collaborative Ontology Development Based on Change Management

“…Examples of such collaborative development processes can be found in international institutions like the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 7 which is developing and maintaining large ontologies in the fishery domain [5], or the World Health Organization (WHO), which is developing and maintaining large ontologies and classifications in the medical domain, such as ICD 8 (International Classification of Diseases) or ICPS 9 (International Classification for Patient Safety). Another similar example is the Gene Ontology (GO) project, 10 which addresses the need for consistent descriptions of gene products in different databases.…”