Collaborative vocabulary development in the context of data integration is the process of finding consensus between the experts of the different systems and domains. The complexity of this process is increased with the number of involved people, the variety of the systems to be integrated and the dynamics of their domain. In this paper we advocate that the realization of a powerful version control system is the heart of the problem. Driven by this idea and the success of Git in the context of software development, we investigate the applicability of Git for collaborative vocabulary development. Even though vocabulary development and software development have much more similarities than differences there are still important differences. These need to be considered within the development of a successful versioning and collaboration system for vocabulary development. Therefore, this paper starts by presenting the challenges we were faced with during the creation of vocabularies collaboratively and discusses its distinction to software development. Based on these insights we propose Git4Voc which comprises guidelines how Git can be adopted to vocabulary development. Finally, we demonstrate how Git hooks can be implemented to go beyond the plain functionality of Git by realizing vocabulary-specific features like syntactic validation and semantic diffs.
Collaborative vocabulary development is an active research area in the Semantic Web community @cite_9 . Existing approaches like @cite_6 provides a collaborative web frontend for a subset of the functionality of the Prot 'eg 'e OWL editor. The aim of WebProt 'eg 'e, is to lower the threshold for collaborative ontology development. @cite_16 is a vocabulary publishing platform, with a focus on ease of use and compatibility with Linked Data principles. Neologism focuses more on vocabulary publishing and less on collaboration. VocBench @cite_1 , is an open source web application for editing thesauri complying with the SKOS and SKOS-XL standards. VocBench has a focus on collaboration, supported by workflow management for content validation and publication.
@cite_9 @cite_16 @cite_1 @cite_6
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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. Creating, documenting, publishing and maintaining an RDF Schema vocabulary is a complex, time-consuming task. This makes vocabulary maintainers reluctant to evolve their creations quickly in response to user feedback; it prevents use of RDF for casual, ad-hoc data publication about niche topics; it leads to poorly documented vocabularies, and contributes to poor compliance of vocabularies with bestpractice recommendations. Neologism is a web-based vocabulary editor and publishing system that dramatically reduces the time required to create, publish and modify vocabularies. By removing a lot of pain from this process, Neologism will contribute to a generally more interesting, relevant and standards-compliant Semantic Web. In this paper, we present WebProtege---a lightweight ontology editor and knowledge acquisition tool for the Web. With the wide adoption of Web 2.0 platforms and the gradual adoption of ontologies and Semantic Web technologies in the real world, we need ontology-development tools that are better suited for the novel ways of interacting, constructing and consuming knowledge. Users today take Web-based content creation and online collaboration for granted. WebProtege integrates these features as part of the ontology development process itself. We tried to lower the entry barrier to ontology development by providing a tool that is accessible from any Web browser, has extensive support for collaboration, and a highly customizable and pluggable user interface that can be adapted to any level of user expertise. The declarative user interface enabled us to create custom knowledge-acquisition forms tailored for domain experts. We built WebProtege using the existing Protege infrastructure, which supports collaboration on the back end side, and the Google Web Toolkit for the front end. The generic and extensible infrastructure allowed us to easily deploy WebProtege in production settings for several projects. We present the main features of WebProtege and its architecture and describe briefly some of its uses for real-world projects. WebProtege is free and open source. An online demo is available at http: webprotege.stanford.edu.