Approach To Collaborative Ontology Development On The Basis Of Change Management

As a basis for information sharing and reuse at the semantic level, the Ontology ismore widely used in various fields. Owing to the more and more rich domain knowledgeand the interiorized concept of “users contribute value”, traditional ontology developmentmode gradually shifts to collaborative development mode. Collaborative development ischaracterized by real-time, distribution and non-binding. These features make thecollaborative development face several problems, such as the interaction between thedevelopers, ontology version management and the ontology consistency maintenance.Different ontology developers will do different editions or modifications to the sameontology during the collaborative development process. In order to make the developedontology has well consistency and availability, the effective management of ontologychanges also had become a serious problem to be solved. Most of the existing ontologydevelopment tools only can be applied to the development of a single developer, which hascertain limitations to support the collaborative development of large-scale body for expertsin different fields.To solve those problems, this paper regarded the collaborative ontology developmentprocess as is driven by changes, and provided a holistic approach to collaborative ontologydevelopment based on change management including the crucial technologies. The maincontents and contributions of this paper included:1. Formalized specification for collaborative ontology development processes. Thispaper formalized the collaborative ontology development process as an collaborativeeditorial workflow, and modeled a workflow ontology by abstract concepts from theeditorial workflow to specific the collaborative development process formally. Theenactment and management of the editorial workflow is also researched by this paper.2. Proposed the approaches for ontology change management under a distributedenvironment. Focused on change representation, manipulation, and propagation, this paperresearched on the ontology change management under a distributed environment. This paperhas provided a generic change ontology to represent ontology changes formally. The genericchange ontology is independent from the underline ontology language and has a morefine-grained division of ontology changes. Considered to the situation that ontology changespropagated to metadata, this paper has provided a change propagation mechanism named as “Synchronization”, which supported the change propagation between distributed copies ofthe ontology.3. Offer the crucial technology for collaborative ontology development under adistributed environment. On the basis of change management approaches under a distributedenvironment, this paper offered the technology architecture for collaborative ontologydevelopment under the distributed environment and related plug-ins.4. Demonstrations for the real instance. This paper verified the approach by using thecollaborative development process of the Communications Industry Occupational SkillTesting Ontology in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology as an instance.The experiment consequences showed that the approach offered by this paper isavailable and effective.