The State of Multi-User Ontology Engineering

Collaborative ontology engineering enables the creation of large complex ontologies. However, few projects successfully perform such multi-user ontology modeling. This paper gives an overview of ten different ontology engineering projects’ infrastructure, architecture and workflows. It especially focuses on issues regarding collaborative ontology modeling. The survey leads on to a discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of asynchronous and synchronous modalities of multiuser editing. This discussion highlights issues, trends and problems in the field of multi-user ontology development.