In collaborative agile ontology development projects support for modular reuse of ontologies from large existing remote repositories, ontology project life cycle management, and transitive dependency management are important needs. The Apache Maven approach has proven its success in distributed collaborative Software Engineering by its widespread adoption. The contribution of this paper is a new design artifact called OntoMaven. OntoMaven adopts the Maven-based development methodology and adapts its concepts to knowledge engineering for Maven-based ontology development and management of ontology artifacts in distributed ontology repositories.
New standardization efforts such as OMG Application Programming Interfaces for Knowledge Bases (OMG API4KB) www.omgwiki.org API4KB and OMG OntoIOP aim at the accessability and interoperability of heterogenous ontologies via standardized interfaces and semantic transformations defined on the meta-level of the ontology models, e.g., by the Distributed Ontology Language (DOL) @cite_10 . These approaches do not address ontology engineering directly, but can provide a standardized repository back-end for OntoMaven ontology development projects.
@cite_10
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The Distributed Ontology Language (DOL) is currently being standardized within the OntoIOp (Ontology Integration and Interoperability) activity of ISO TC 37 SC 3. It aims at providing a unified framework for (1) ontologies formalized in heterogeneous logics, (2) modular ontologies, (3) links between ontologies, and (4) annotation of ontologies. This paper focuses on an application of DOL's meta-theoretical features in mathematical formalization: validating relationships between ontological formalizations of mathematical concepts in COLORE (Common Logic Repository), which provide the foundation for formalizing real-world notions such as spatial and temporal relations.