On Jul 10, 2006, at 11:40 PM, William Bug wrote:
However, there doesn't appear to be a means within the OBO/NCBO
community for doing this sort of distributed ontology design right
now. Two of the tools in wide spread use - Protégé and OBO-Edit
are really not designed to support distributed and shared
development, such as you'd find in a typical distributed
architecture - whether it be a standard client-server RDBMS-based
approach, one using some "active pages" technology such as php,
Zope, Ruby on Rails, Java Servlet/Portlet frameworks, etc. - or a
more asynchronous approach using messaging and/or web services to
assemble the required components from the various authoritative
sources.
Bill,
I hate to sound like a salesperson, but Protégé in its multi-user
mode (using the relational database backend) would seem to be just
what you are looking for. Protégé (both the frames and the OWL
facility) allow distributed users to work simultaneously on an
ontology stored on a remote server. As the ontology is updated, all
the Protégé clients refresh automatically to display the changes.
NCI currently is experimenting with this architecture for the
development of the NCI Thesaurus in OWL, and they have developers
stationed all across the country. I'm told that Perot Systems, using
the frame-based representation, has nearly 100 Protégé users working
on the same ontology simultaneously.
Mark
P.S. While I'm plugging Protégé, don't forget that the Ninth Annual
Protégé Conference takes place at Stanford next week (see http://
protege.stanford.edu/conference/2006/).
