Collaborative ontology engineering: a survey

Abstract

Building ontologies in a collaborative and increasingly community-driven fashion has become a central paradigm of modern ontology engineering. This understanding of ontologies and ontology engineering processes is the result of intensive theoretical and empirical research within the Semantic Web community, supported by technology developments such as Web 2.0. Over 6 years after the publication of the first methodology for collaborative ontology engineering, it is generally acknowledged that, in order to be useful, but also economically feasible, ontologies should be developed and maintained in a community-driven manner, with the help of fully-fledged environments providing dedicated support for collaboration and user participation. Wikis, and similar communication and collaboration platforms enabling ontology stakeholders to exchange ideas and discuss modeling decisions are probably the most important technological components of such environments. In addition, process-driven methodologies assist the ontology engineering team throughout the ontology life cycle, and provide empirically grounded best practices and guidelines for optimizing ontology development results in real-world projects. The goal of this article is to analyze the state of the art in the field of collaborative ontology engineering. We will survey several of the most outstanding methodologies, methods and techniques that have emerged in the last years, and present the most popular development environments, which can be utilized to carry out, or facilitate specific activities within the methodologies. A discussion of the open issues identified concludes the survey and provides a roadmap for future research and development in this lively and promising field.

Building a Synchrotron Ontology: An Analysis of a Synchrotron Control System in a Collaborative Environment

“…In the literature, there are lots of methodologies and methods presented for the purpose of building ontologies from scratch [14,16,31,33]. The relationship between methodologies and methods is that a methodology is a series of methods and techniques while a method is a general procedure that can be applied by using specific techniques [32].…”

“…Therefore, the last phase covers the whole application ontology building process. A collaborative ontology developing process starts with an analysis of the domain to be captured by the ontology as well as the requirements imposed by the ontologybased application [31]. A domain ontology will be designed upon the analysis of the Solaris synchrotron control system as well as gathering knowledge from synchrotron community experts.…”

An architecture for the autonomic curation of crowdsourced knowledge

“…To assess the robustness of the plan, several alternatives were investigated with respect to the architecture of the autonomic system (identified as the main discrimination criteria in the literature [20,21,26]) as well as the type and structure of the knowledge layer (presented as significant decision factors within the ontology engineering process [38,42]). …”

POEM: Practical ontology engineering model for semantic web ontologies

“…ontology development team (ODT), DEs, and organization) work as a single group under a single roof at a single location with a single agenda. In collaborative OE, the stockholders work as decentralized groups at disperse geographical location with potentially divergent agendas and mutually established consensus (Simperl & Luczak-Rösch, 2013). These two schools of OE have support from the specifically designed and developed scenario processes, methodologies, and tools.…”