An ontology development and maintenance system

Abstract

Modern intellectual information systems make use of web ontologies for greater flexibility. The number of ontologies in the Linked Open Data cloud grows every year. There are many tools related to web ontologies, e. g. editors, inference engines, triple stores. Ontology development is now done by groups of people including ontology engineers, domain specialists, quality assurance staff and others. This paper discusses the problems and tasks of collaborative development and maintenance of web ontologies and introduces a system that facilitates these tasks. We suggest an approach based on using issue tracking systems together with distributed source code management systems for ontology development and maintenance. This approach permits collaborative working on semantic web ontologies, versioning them, posting and discussing issues linked to specific versions of ontologies and much more. Compared to other approaches (like web-editors), our approach allows using of any customary ontology editor and gives all of the advantages of distributed source code management such as creating new versions without network connection. There are, however, some problems which do not allow using just source code management systems with ontologies. We also discuss these problems and propose a solution which utilizes the ability of source code management systems to be extended.