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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.
Key finding: This study identified essential requirements for effective collaboration during ontology development, including integrated discussion forums, chat, and annotation facilities tied directly to ontology components within... Read more
Key finding: The paper analyzed Protégé's existing facilities for managing ontology evolution such as undo/redo, version archiving, and the PROMPT plugin for ontology merging and comparison, highlighting limitations in their ability to... Read more
Key finding: This practical guide elucidates the methodical use of Protégé 4 for building OWL-DL ontologies with reasoning support, detailing how description logic reasoning can verify class consistency and automatically classify... Read more
Key finding: The paper compared Protégé 3.4 with other ontology editors (Apollo, IsaViz, SWOOP), highlighting Protégé's flexibility for meta-modeling, ontology construction, and custom data entry form support, emphasizing its predominant... Read more
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.
Key finding: The paper introduced ModOnto, a tool embedding object-oriented principles of encapsulation and information hiding into ontology modularization, enabling selective reuse of ontology fragments rather than entire ontologies. The... Read more
Key finding: This work presented an extension to Protégé that manages ontology networks via semantically meaningful relationships such as usesSymbolOf and mapsSymbolsTo, allowing the construction and editing of interconnected ontologies... Read more
Key finding: The chapter outlined ontological engineering concepts including ontology lifecycle, principles, and modular design. It emphasized the importance of ontological modularity for complex system development and advocated... Read more
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.
Key finding: The study proposed AMOD, an agile methodology integrating Scrum phases with ontology engineering activities, improving ontology reliability and adaptability. Applied in software project time management, AMOD demonstrated a... Read more
Key finding: The paper presented a concrete set of rules and a transformation tool (ER2OWL) to convert Extended Entity-Relationship diagrams, commonly used in legacy systems, into OWL-DL ontologies automating ontology creation from... Read more
Key finding: This case study used Protégé 4.0 to develop a comprehensive University ontology capturing hierarchical classes, properties, and relations pertinent to the education domain. The work demonstrated the practical application of... Read more
Key finding: Investigated ontological modeling principles applied to cope with heterogeneity of software environments in higher education computing through ontology-based approaches, highlighting how semantic modeling in Protégé can... Read more