Collaborative Ontology Development in Protege

Collaborative ontology development is one of the recent and most important topics in the Semantic Web community. Ontologies are no longer developed by single individuals, but are built by a group of people sharing a common goal. In my talk, I will present some of the challenges that need to be tackled in a collaborative ontology development environment and I will point out some of the functionalities that such an environment should provide. I will present different collaborative development scenarios and workflows. I will give a brief demo of a prototype we have built to support the collaborative ontology development process, called Collaborative Protégé, which is an extension of the existing Protégé system http://protege.stanford.edu/. In addition to the common ontology editing operations, the prototype enables annotation of both ontology components and ontology changes. It supports the searching and filtering of user annotations based on different criteria. We have also implemented two types of voting mechanisms that can be used for voting of change proposals.