Pragmatic analysis of collaborative ontology engineering processes

Ontology evaluation still poses an open problem where new approaches and techniques are needed to better assess the quality of an ontology. Especially in the field of collaborative ontology engineering, where traditional evaluation methods only focus on the ontology as a product, it is important to include social factors into the analysis of these collaborative ontology engineering processes, similar to the Agile Programming movement that shifted the attention towards the engineering process itself. In this thesis an analysis of social factors for five different collaborative ontology engineering projects was conducted, providing quantitative and qualitative insights that could be used to enhance ontology development tools or further enhance traditional evaluation techniques. Collaborative authoring systems provide a number of advantages such as an increased coverage and number of participating users. However, they also suffer from novel challenges and risks such as low participation, lack of coordination, lack of control or other related problems that are neither well understood nor addressed by the current state of research. To be able to monitor and influence activity within collaborative ontology engineering projects a set of different types of recommender techniques have been implemented and evaluated.