Collaborative Ontology Development Using the Webulous Architecture and Google App

Authoring bio-ontologies is a task that traditionally requires contributions from both a domain expert and an ontology engineer. That many domain experts are not also experts in ontology design or in languages as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a significant bottleneck in the development process, especially as requests typically outnumber the bandwidth of a single ontology developer, which impacts both ontology development and the ability to semantically describe data typically seen in the Semantic Web. We present the Webulous architecture, a server-client application for developing ontologies based on customisable client interfaces. We also describe the Webulous Google App, a client to Webulous that allows collaborative, online editing of Google Spreadsheets. These spreadsheets can be pre-populated with parts of ontologies loaded from resources such as BioPortal and can be rapidly turned into new ontology terms using behind the scene templates which automatically axiomatise cells in a row to create rich and consistent ontology classes.