Towards a user-friendly solution for collaboratively managing a developed ontology

Ontologies are getting popular for knowledge representation because it is capable of representing the semantics of the knowledge. However, with the evolution of the knowledge, maintaining and support evolution of a developed ontology becomes a complex task. We can get help of domain experts to maintain the ontology as a solution. But, that approach has another problem which is often domain experts do not know about ontology concepts, languages and tools. Also, if we try to accomplish ontology maintenance by the help of domain experts, there should be a technique to maintain ontology collaboratively. In a collaborative ontology development environment, when one user modifying the ontology, other users should also aware of that modification. In order to achieve this awareness, keeping a history of modifications is required. Furthermore, one user’s modifications may conflict with others modifications; therefore, the ontology development system should support that kind of situations too. This study mainly concerns how to maintain the structure of a developed ontology collaboratively. This study follows synchronous collaborative technique by keeping ontology in a central server. Collaborative partners are able to modify and maintain the ontology through user-friendly web-based interfaces. Since the ontology keeps in central place every user knows what modifications happen to the ontology in real time. Also modifications are recorded in a relational database and users are allowed to access those change history when it needed. Versions of the ontology are generated based on modification types. If the modification affects backward compatibility then a new version is created and if not current version is updated. To distinguish different versions, semantic versioning standard is used. The implemented system is validated individually and evaluated by the help of a user group. Validation and evaluation results prove that system is performing as expected