Collaborative Ontology Construction for Information Integration

Information integration is enabled by having a precisely defined common terminology. We call this combination of terminology and definitions an ontology . We have developed a set of tools and services to support the process of achieving consensus on such a common shared ontologies by geographically distributed groups. These tools make use of the world-wide web to enable wide access and provide users with the ability to publish, browse, create, and edit ontologies stored on an ontology server. Users can quickly assemble a new ontology from a library of modules. We discuss how our system was constructed, how it exploits existing protocols and browsing tools, and our experience supporting hundreds of users. We describe applications using our tools to achieve consensus on ontologies and to integrate information. The ontology server may be accessed through the URL http://www-ksl-svc.stanford.edu:5915/