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OntoEditor: Real-Time Collaboration via Distributed Version Control for Ontology Development

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The Semantic Web (ESWC 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14664))

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Abstract

In today’s remote work environment, the demand for real-time collaborative tools has surged. Our research targets efficient collaboration among knowledge engineers and domain experts in Ontology development. We developed a web-based tool for real-time collaboration, compatible with GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket. To tackle the challenge of concurrent modifications leading to potential inconsistencies, we integrated an Operational Transformation-based real-time database. This integration enables multiple users to concurrently collaborate to build and edit their ontologies, ensuring both consistency and atomicity. Furthermore, our tool enhances user experience by providing meaningful syntax error messages for ontologies expressed in various RDF serialization formats. This streamlined the manual correction process. Additionally, we established a reliable synchronization channel for users to allow pulling and committing changes to distributed repositories for their developed ontologies. Yielding promising results, our evaluation focused on two key aspects: first, assessing the tool’s collaborative editing consistency via an automated typing script; second, conducting a comprehensive user study to evaluate its features and compare its functionalities with similar tools.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://git-scm.com/.

  2. 2.

    https://blog.bit.ai/collaboration-statistics/.

  3. 3.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar.

  4. 4.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/turtle.

  5. 5.

    https://www.overleaf.com/learn.

  6. 6.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11.

  7. 7.

    https://codemirror.net/.

  8. 8.

    https://share.github.io/sharedb/.

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/ottypes/text.

  10. 10.

    https://github.com/wickedest/Mergely.

  11. 11.

    https://socket.io.

  12. 12.

    https://github.com/rdfjs/N3.js.

  13. 13.

    https://github.com/rdfjs/rdfxml-streaming-parser.js.

  14. 14.

    https://github.com/rubensworks/jsonld-streaming-parser.js.

  15. 15.

    https://w3id.org/ontoeditor.

  16. 16.

    https://garyperlman.com/quest/quest.cgi?form=USE.

References

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  3. Dang, Q.: Secure Hash Standard (SHS), Federal Information Processing Standard (NIST FIPS). National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD (2012). https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.FIPS.180-4

  4. Ellis, C.A., Gibbs, S.J.: Concurrency control in groupware systems. SIGMOD Rec., pp. 399–407 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1145/66926.66963

  5. Fette, I., Melnikov, A.: The WebSocket Protocol (2011). https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455. Accessed 11 Nov 2023

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Acknowledgement

We express gratitude to the Cognitive Internet Technologies Research Center at Fraunhofer for their vital support, as well as to our colleagues and students for their collaborative efforts. This work has been partially funded by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) under grant number 2522DIG012. Special thanks to ChatGPT [9] for enhancing writing quality, optimizing sentence structure, and eliminating errors in this paper. We also acknowledge its use in summarizing initial notes and proofreading the final draft, extending our appreciation to its developers.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fraunhofer FIT, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Sankt Augustin, Germany

    Ahmad Hemid, Christoph Lange, Christoph Quix & Stefan Decker

  2. Fraunhofer IAIS, Enterprise Information Systems, Sankt Augustin, Germany

    Waleed Shabbir & Abderrahmane Khiat

  3. Hochschule Niederrhein, Krefeld, Germany

    Christoph Quix

  4. RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Christoph Lange & Stefan Decker

Authors
  1. Ahmad Hemid
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  2. Waleed Shabbir
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  3. Abderrahmane Khiat
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  4. Christoph Lange
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  5. Christoph Quix
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  6. Stefan Decker
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ahmad Hemid .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College London, London, UK

    Albert Meroño Peñuela

  2. KU Leuven, Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium

    Anastasia Dimou

  3. EURECOM, Biot, France

    Raphaël Troncy

  4. Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Olaf Hartig

  5. Technical University of Munich, Heilbronn, Germany

    Maribel Acosta

  6. Polytechnic Institute of Paris, Palaiseau, France

    Mehwish Alam

  7. University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Heiko Paulheim

  8. EURECOM, Biot, France

    Pasquale Lisena

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Hemid, A., Shabbir, W., Khiat, A., Lange, C., Quix, C., Decker, S. (2024). OntoEditor: Real-Time Collaboration via Distributed Version Control for Ontology Development. In: Meroño Peñuela, A., et al. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14664. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60626-7_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60626-7_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-60625-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-60626-7

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