DOGMA-MESS: A tool for fact-oriented collaborative ontology evolution

Abstract

Ontologies being shared formal specifications of a domain, are an important lever for developing meaningful internet systems. However, the problem is not in what ontologies are, but how they become operationally relevant and sustainable over longer periods of time. Fact-oriented and layered approaches such as DOGMA have been successful in facilitating domain experts in representing and understanding semantically stable ontologies, while emphasising reusability and scalability. DOGMA-MESS, extending DOGMA, is a collaborative ontology evolution methodology that supports stakeholders in iteratively interpreting and modeling their common ontologies in their own terminology and context, and feeding back these results to the owning community. In this paper we extend DOGMA Studio with a set of collaborative ontology evolution support modules.