RE: Versioning system for ontologies

We've looked at 3 tools that do ontology "semantic/logical" versioning, to some extent, which is harder than syntactic string-based methods like Subversion, etc.  "Semantic/logical" ontology versioning is much harder than code-change tools.

Or, rather, 2 ontology Diff tools and one ontology versioning tool. The latter is the most ambitious and promising, but is still early on in its development, as far as we can tell.

The first two are:

1)      OWL Diff (in Protégé 4.2): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzMNDfy4jcg.

2)      OWLDiff: http://krizik.felk.cvut.cz/km/owldiff/

3)      HypergraphDB: http://www.sharegov.org/#!../protegehgdb/owltools.html.

(1) just displays (readable only, capturable by screen snapshot) differences between 2 ontologies, and really needs an output format, perhaps to spreadsheet format.
(2) works primarily on the OWL 2 EL profile.
(3) is really close to what we need, but is still early in its development and requires ontology development for versioning using the tool from the get-go. Which is not realistic.

We are going initially with (1), which strictly satisfies our need for Diff-ing ontologies, but we think we need to either modify the potential output formats or strongly suggest to the Protégé development team that they make better output formats available.

Thanks,
Leo

From: asaegyn@gmail.com [mailto:asaegyn@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Ali SH
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2013 12:39 PM
To: Stephen D. Williams
Cc: Prateek; semantic-web@w3.org
Subject: Re: Versioning system for ontologies

I'm also very interested in hearing answers to this.

As Stephen mentions, treating an ontology analogously to source code (which is close enough) means that you can use services such as github (or google code). The downside is that an ontology lifecycle management is not equivalent to source code management. Barring a native solution for ontologies, they do come quite close.

You might also be interested in following the development of the Open Ontology Repository [1]
(a fork of the BioPortal platform), which among other things will be addressing this issue as well.

[1] http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OpenOntologyRepository
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 11:57 AM, Stephen D. Williams <sdw@lig.net<mailto:sdw@lig.net>> wrote:
Do you want to version it like source code?  Everyone has, is, or will move to Git for that.
Or maintain the history of changes for reasoning and/or historical queries?  This is probably more needed for actual statements, but could make sense here too: "Answer this query based on the ontology at time X."

Stephen


On 4/19/13 7:05 AM, Prateek wrote:
Hello all,

I am trying to identify a system which will provide versioning and revision control capabilities specifically for ontologies. Does anyone have any experience and idea about which systems can help out or if systems like SVN, CVS can do the job?

Regards

Prateek

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