Fine-Grained Configuration Management for Collaborative Ontology Development

Fine-grained software configuration management has been proven to offer substantial benefits for software development in many fields, overcoming developmental problems, such as complexity management and support for communication and coordination, among others. The same problems exist in a collaborative ontology development environment that uses a simple versioning and configuration management system. The author presents a general mechanism to support hierarchy versioning and configuration item management in collaborative ontology development. This fine-grained configuration management mechanism can help solve collaborative developmental problems. An implementation system is presented to illustrate the capability and efficiency of this mechanism.