Structural Conflict Avoidance in Collaborative Ontology Engineering

Given the increasing importance of ontologies in enterprise settings, mechanisms enabling users working simultaneously to edit and engineer ontologies in a collaborative environment are required. The challenges that may arise in attempting to prevent structural conflicts when several users edit ontologies simultaneously are not trivial, given the high level of dependencies between concepts in ontologies. In this paper we identify and classify these dependencies. Sophisticated ontology locking mechanisms based on a graph depiction of the dependencies that are sufficient for preventing structural conflicts arising in collaborative settings are proposed. Applications of this research to the Semantic Web are also considered.