An analysis of collaborative patterns in large-scale ontology development projects.

ABSTRACTToday, distributed teams collaboratively create and maintain more and more ontologies. To support this type of ontology development, software engineers are introducing a new generation of tools. However, we know relatively little about how existing large-scale collaborative ontology development works and what user workflows the tools must support. In this paper, we analyze our experience in supporting several such projects. We describe a visual and interactive project-management tool that we have developed, which helps ontology developers explore historical ontology change and discussion data. We present the results of qualitative and quantitative studies of the collaborative activity associated with three large-scale ontology-development projects. Based on the analysis, we conclude that domain and ontology experts have different patterns of ontology editing behavior, which has important implications for ontology-development tools.