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Proactive prevention of false-positive conflicts in distributed ontology development

Abstract:

A Version Control System (VCS) is usually required for successful ontology development in distributed settings VCSs enable the tracking and propagation of ontology changes, as well as collecting metadata to describ changes, e.g., who made a change at which point in time. Modern VCSs implement an optimisti approach that allows for simultaneous changes of the same artifact and provides mechanisms for automati as well as manual conflict resolution. However, different ontology development tools serialize the ontolog artifacts in different ways. As a consequence, existing VCSs may identify a huge number of false-positiv conflicts during the merging process, i.e., conflicts that do not result from ontology changes but the fact tha two ontology versions are differently serialized. Following the principle of prevention is better than cure, w designed SerVCS, an approach that enhances VCSs to cope with different serializations of the same ontology SerVCS is based on a unique serialization of ontologies to reduce the number of false-positive conflict produced whenever different serializations of the same ontology are compared. We implemented SerVCS o top of Git, utilizing tools such as Rapper and Rdf-Toolkit for syntax validation and unique serialization, respectively We have conducted an empirical evaluation to determine the conflict detection accuracy of SerVC whenever simultaneous changes to an ontology are performed using different ontology editors. The evaluatio results suggest that SerVCS empowers VCSs by preventing them from wrongly identifying serializatio related conflicts.