OntoEditor: Real-Time Collaboration via Distributed Version Control for Ontology Development

In today’s remote work environment, the demand for real-time collaborative tools has surged. Our research targets efficient collaboration among knowledge engineers and domain experts in Ontology development. We developed a web-based tool for real-time collaboration, compatible with GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket. To tackle the challenge of concurrent modifications leading to potential inconsistencies, we integrated an Operational Transformation-based real-time database. This integration enables multiple users to concurrently collaborate to build and edit their ontologies, ensuring both consistency and atomicity. Furthermore, our tool enhances user experience by providing meaningful syntax error messages for ontologies expressed in various RDF serialization formats. This streamlined the manual correction process. Additionally, we established a reliable synchronization channel for users to allow pulling and committing changes to distributed repositories for their developed ontologies. Yielding promising results, our evaluation focused on two key aspects: first, assessing the tool’s collaborative editing consistency via an automated typing script; second, conducting a comprehensive user study to evaluate its features and compare its functionalities with similar tools.