Key research themes
1. How do ontology editors support collaborative and large-scale ontology development in Protégé?
This research area investigates tools and features integrated into Protégé to facilitate collaborative ontology development for large, expressive ontologies used in complex domains like biomedicine. It focuses on methods that support distributed editing, maintain change traceability, integrate discussions and annotations within the ontology development process, and handle the challenges associated with evolving ontologies to ensure usability and maintainability by large, often multidisciplinary teams.
2. What role does modularization and ontology network management play in enhancing Protégé-based ontology development?
This theme covers approaches and tools developed to improve ontology reuse, modularization, and integration within Protégé and related environments. It focuses on methods that decompose large ontologies into manageable modules, preserve semantic integrity when connecting multiple ontologies via networks, and maintain independence between source ontologies while enabling effective knowledge reuse. The goal is to mitigate performance issues, support scalability, and facilitate targeted reuse of ontology fragments.
3. How can domain-specific methodologies and data transformation approaches enhance ontology development in Protégé for particular applications?
This research domain investigates methodologies tailored to specific domains and legacy data integration techniques that improve ontology development effectiveness using Protégé. Studies focus on agile and reusable development processes, automated transformation of traditional data models (e.g., ER diagrams) into OWL ontologies, and modeling patterns that ease domain expert involvement. The aim is to bridge gaps between domain knowledge, existing data representations, and Protégé's ontology frameworks to produce reliable, adaptable, and semantically rich ontologies.