- From: Mark Musen <musen@Stanford.EDU>
- Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 21:53:50 -0700
- To: William Bug <William.Bug@DrexelMed.edu>
- Cc: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>, Trish Whetzel <whetzel@pcbi.upenn.edu>, Alan Rector <rector@cs.man.ac.uk>, w3c semweb hcls <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>, Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk>
On Jul 10, 2006, at 11:40 PM, William Bug wrote: > However, there doesn't appear to be a means within the OBO/NCBO > community for doing this sort of distributed ontology design right > now. Two of the tools in wide spread use - Protégé and OBO-Edit > are really not designed to support distributed and shared > development, such as you'd find in a typical distributed > architecture - whether it be a standard client-server RDBMS-based > approach, one using some "active pages" technology such as php, > Zope, Ruby on Rails, Java Servlet/Portlet frameworks, etc. - or a > more asynchronous approach using messaging and/or web services to > assemble the required components from the various authoritative > sources. Bill, I hate to sound like a salesperson, but Protégé in its multi-user mode (using the relational database backend) would seem to be just what you are looking for. Protégé (both the frames and the OWL facility) allow distributed users to work simultaneously on an ontology stored on a remote server. As the ontology is updated, all the Protégé clients refresh automatically to display the changes. NCI currently is experimenting with this architecture for the development of the NCI Thesaurus in OWL, and they have developers stationed all across the country. I'm told that Perot Systems, using the frame-based representation, has nearly 100 Protégé users working on the same ontology simultaneously. Mark P.S. While I'm plugging Protégé, don't forget that the Ninth Annual Protégé Conference takes place at Stanford next week (see http:// protege.stanford.edu/conference/2006/).
Received on Sunday, 16 July 2006 04:53:54 UTC