Practical experiences in concurrent, collaborative ontology building using Collaborative Protégé

Abstract

Creation of an ontology according to some common plan is best accomplished collaboratively. This is sometimes contradicted by the distribution of the ontology’s developers. An obvious solution therefore is to build collaboration into ontology development tools. Such support necessarily includes both the technical means to perform editing operations upon an ontology, but also support for the communication that makes collaboration such a vital part of much ontology development. To investigate the distributed, collaborative ontology engineering process and the corresponding capabilities of the Collaborative Protege 3 (CP) tool, members of the OntoGenesis network came together and enriched the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI) with new content. The communications and interactions of the participants with each other, directly or through the tool, were tracked and analyzed. Our initial analysis of the degree to which this new tool fulfills the practical requirements of collaborative ontology engineering suggests the approach is promising. We present some observations and recommendations for CP based upon this experience.