What about sea urchins? : collaborative ontology building among bio-informaticians

This paper reports on an ongoing study of collaborative, distributed ontology building. Ontologies are now widely used in the biological sciences and are increasingly being deployed to other purposes. Here, our ethnographic study (see Randall et al., 2007) concentrates on a series of meetings and online discussions taking place with a small group of people meeting to rebuild a 'hand rafted'ontology.