OntoMaven: Maven-based Ontology Development and Management of Distributed Ontology Repositories
This addresses the needs of knowledge engineers in agile ontology projects by providing a structured approach for managing distributed ontology artifacts.
The paper tackles the problem of collaborative ontology development by introducing OntoMaven, a design artifact that adapts Apache Maven's methodology to enable modular reuse, lifecycle management, and dependency handling for ontologies in distributed repositories.
In collaborative agile ontology development projects support for modular reuse of ontologies from large existing remote repositories, ontology project life cycle management, and transitive dependency management are important needs. The Apache Maven approach has proven its success in distributed collaborative Software Engineering by its widespread adoption. The contribution of this paper is a new design artifact called OntoMaven. OntoMaven adopts the Maven-based development methodology and adapts its concepts to knowledge engineering for Maven-based ontology development and management of ontology artifacts in distributed ontology repositories.