Distributed Ontology Development with Protege

One approach to ontology development is to have several domain experts concurrently editing a common ontology. For example, this approach is currently being used by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to support the development of the NCI Thesaurus which contains over 50000 concepts. NCI is using a Protégé Server, residing in Bethesda, which supplies ontology content and editors access this server to edit the Thesaurus remotely using the Protégé client. In this talk we will discuss another Protégé server that is being made available to the ontology community for collaborative ontology development. Dubbed "CODS," this server is hosted by CIM3 which provides a highly reliable and accessible infrastructure. Users accessing the Protégé Server will be able to create their own accounts, create new projects and edit shared ontologies. We will also describe a vision of the future of ontology servers which will combine tools for browsing, visualization, cross referencing and editing.