Agreed. Multi-user support is not the same as computer support for
collaborative work. Indeed, we are hoping that our upcoming grant
will enable us to explore that space a bit as well.
Mark
On Jul 17, 2006, at 4:00 AM, Phillip Lord wrote:
"MM" == Mark Musen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
MM> 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
MM> I hate to sound like a salesperson, but Protégé in its
MM> multi-user mode (using the relational database backend) would
MM> seem to be just what you are looking for. Protégé (both the
MM> frames and the OWL facility) allow distributed users to work
MM> simultaneously on an ontology stored on a remote server. As the
MM> ontology is updated, all the Protégé clients refresh
MM> automatically to display the changes.
Mark,
If I may be so bold, this is not really distributed development, more
collaborative development. It wouldn't help much if, for example, we
wished to develop an ontology together as we'd never be at work at the
same time (partly because of time zones, partly cause I'm a lazy sod).
For distributed development, you want the ability to fork, merge,
inform, as opposed to simultaneously.
My own feeling about this (at least with respect to OWL) is what we
really need is a) a human readable syntax b) language support for
modularity (including privacy, visibility and so on) and c) standard
best practices for using these two. Then we can stop worrying and just
use the same tooling for ontology development as we do for software
development. As far as I can see, the issues are all the same.
Still, you are right, protege is probably the best option out there at
the moment!
Phil
