Peer-to-peer collaborative editing of ontologies

In This work we present COE, a peer-to-peer collaborative ontology editor, which supports creation, edition, sharing, and reuse of ontologies. COE was implemented on top of a general-purpose peer-to-peer framework, COPPEER. Ontologies are particularly useful as a design tool because they render the communication between people and the interoperability between systems easier. In large multidisciplinary design projects, ontologies can be a critical success factor. The collaborative creation of ontologies allows for better understanding among participants of a project and economy of resource among projects. Meanwhile, a P2P approach is expected to enable new modes of collaboration.

1. Ontologies in Design

The design activity has been described as belonging to a class of problems known as “wicked”. These problems are ill specified and have no optimal solution, only satisfactory ones. They are complex, usually interdisciplinary in nature and require a group of people to solve. In particular, design problems, especially large ones such as software, automobile or plant design, require groups of individuals working at different stages of the process (sometimes in parallel) to come to a successful end.