Collaborative development of ontologies in a Peer-to-Peer environment Draft Thesis

Many applications have a need for a common terminology, to ensure that shared information will have the same meaning to everyone using it. For example, doctors need a common terminology to describe an illness; two software agents exchanging information needs to understand each other even if they use different vocabularies. An ontology is one way to represent terms and relations between terms in a structural way, which enables sharing and reuse of knowledge. The evolvement of the Sementic Web as an extension to the World Wide Web of today has increased the need for ontologies. On the Semantic Web the information will be given meaning by describing it with terms, which can be specified in ontologies. The application OntoRama was originally developed as an application to browse ontologies from an ontology server but has, as part of this thesis, been further developed to be a platform for collaborative work with ontologies in a Peer-To-Peer environment. A Peer-To-Peer architecture is a network where peer communicates directly with each other to share information or resources. This thesis investigates issues that rise when people collaboratively work on ontologies, such as how to represent ontologies, how to handle merging of ontologies, and how to handle opinions of different users. This thesis also investigates the use of a Peer-To-Peer architecture for collaborative work with ontologies. Collaborative development of ontologies in a Peer-to-Peer environment Collaborative development of ontologies in a Peer-to-Peer environment