Collaborative ontology sharing and editing

Abstract

This article first lists reasons why - in the long term or when creating a new knowledge base (KB) for general knowledge sharing purposes - collaboratively building a well-organized KB does/can provide more possibilities, with on the whole no more costs, than the mainstream approach where knowledge creation and re-use involves searching, merging and creating (semi-)independent (relatively small) ontologies or semi-formal documents. The article lists elements required to achieve this and describes the main one: a KB editing protocol that keeps the KB free of automatically/manually detected inconsistencies while not forcing them to discuss or agree on terminology and beliefs nor requiring a selection committee.