Webprotégé : A Collaborative Ontology Editor And Knowledge Acquisition Tool For The Web
WebProtégé's collaboration features
WebProtégé provides extensive collaboration support, including change tracking, contextualized threaded discussions, watches and notifications, an extensible access policy mechanism, and generation of statistics of the ontology-development process [...] All authoring operations in the WebProtégé are tracked as instances of a Changes and Annotation Ontology (ChAO) [9]. Several portlets present this declarative change-tracking information in a user- friendly way. For example, the Changes portlet shows the changes performed on an entity: the author of a change, timestamp, and a user-friendly description of a change. A different portlet displays the changes per- formed in the entire ontology. [...] Users can also have contextualized threaded discussions and notes attached to different entities in the ontology. The notes are typed and structured and are also stored as instances of ChAO. A user may add the Notes Tree portlet to any tab, and the portlet will display the notes attached to the selected entity in a threaded view. [...] A watch functionality allows users to express their interest in certain entities, and unlike wikis, in branches in the ontology. The Watched Entities portlet will display the changes and new notes of the watched entities and branches. A notification mechanism will send email notifications to users containing direct Web links to the watched entities that have changed or have new notes attached to them [...] Project managers are able to follow the progress of the development process by using one of the change- analysis plugins available in the Web platform and also as a plugin of the Protégé desktop client. These plugins present statistics of edits, which can be filtered by authors and time frame, as well as author-network de- pendencies, and tag clouds. [...] WebProtégé supports a flexible access policy mechanism. We defined some common access policies that the user interface enforces, such as Read, Write, Create new users or Display in ontology list. The latter permission controls if an ontology should show up in the list of available ontologies displayed on the home page of WebProtégé, and it allows us to make certain ontologies private. [...] WebProtégé also supports a property-level access policy that allows only a certain group of users to edit that property in a knowledge-acquisition form.