An online system to support collaborative knowledge acquisition for ontology development

Ontology development is an important practice required in any knowledge engineering process. Before knowledge can be integrated and put into good use by computer applications, knowledge acquisition and modeling has to be done. This signifies the adoption of ontology; which is defined as conceptualization or formal specifications of a domain; as the core framework for a knowledge-based system. For faster ontology development process, it is normally done in a collaborative manner and the challenge of having an environment that supports collaborative work is manifold. This includes the challenge of forming a collaborative procedure in acquiring and modeling the knowledge, allocating a platform that is accessible to geographical distributed parties and to handle update conflicts during the development. This paper presents a system in supporting initial collaborative ontology development works between ontology developers without requiring the presence of domain experts, aiming at accelerating the ontology development process. This system is designed in such a way that it incorporates and formalizes a novel collaborative knowledge acquisition and modeling procedure.