...we propose making a web- accessible system (a Grid portal) that maintains a single centrally-held XML document containing the ontology for which all users in a specified group will have access and editing rights. The system will provide each user with their own view of the ontology which will be created on-the-fly from the single source XML document [...] ..the system will allow each user to see (a) which nodes/links (concepts and definitions) in their view of the ontology are and are not shared with others, (b) the common core of the ontology (agreed classes and links) and (c) the ontology from other users’ perspectives. The system will provide appropriate visualisations of the views as annotated graphs and trees. It will also be possible to specify combinations of views, e.g. definitions on which user-1 and user-2 disagree. These features will help users to understand the conceptualisations of others, and so assist the process of reaching consensus.

..the ontology view might be the set of terms and definitions within a certain radius of a selected term, a set which does not itself constitute an ontology but a connected sub-graph (Noy, 2004; Voltz, 2003). The term ‘ontology segmentation’ has been coined to describe the extraction of a subset of an ontology (Seidenberg and Rector, 2006). An ontology view must account for the knowledge representation scheme used to define the ontology: it is necessary to know which elements are classes, instances, relations or quantifiers as these must be treated appropriately. The terms and relations should also be connected – in contrast with database views which need not result in a set of connected elements. The motivation for computing ontology views is similar to that for database views: extracting a smaller subgraph of terms from larger structure should improve the efficiency of automated querying and reasoning, as well as aid human comprehension and discussion.