Ontology construction for semantic web: A role-based collaborative development method

Abstract

Ontologies are often seen as basic building blocks for the semantic web, as they provide a shared and reusable piece of knowledge about a specific domain. With the rapid development of semantic web, the scale and complexity of ontologies grow fast. The construction of large-scale ontologies will involve collaborative efforts of multiple developers. However, collaborative construction of ontologies is a complicated task. This paper discusses the challenging issues in collaborative ontology development, gives an overview of the related technologies and proposes a practical role-based collaborative development method, named RCDM. According to it, a pyramidal taxonomy of roles is adopted to divide ontology developers into different roles. Developers serving as different roles work collaboratively to construct a large-scale ontology, and a weighted statistical algorithm is adopted to solve conflicts led by different opinions. Compared with existing methods, RCDM is more suitable to large-scale ontology development, and does well in developers management, concurrency control, and conflicts resolution. It integrates wisdoms of different kinds of developers, no matter whether they are domain experts or not. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.