VIVO-DE: Collaborative ontology editing & management with VoCol

It is not sufficient to translate the labels of the VIVO-ISF ontology to adopt VIVO to the needs of German research institutions. There is a need for an ontology extension that is tailored to the specifics of the German academic landscape, especially with regard to language and (academic) culture. In order to involve as many stakeholders as possible, a collaborative approach to ontology management is needed. Basing the corresponding workflows solely on Git is an option, which is currently chosen by the German VIVO community (VIVO-DE). However, there is a demand for more user-friendly ways to work together. There is a small number of tools which are specifically developed for collaborative ontological work. One of them is VoCol. In this poster we would like to describe possible use cases for VoCol in the VIVO-DE context, challenges we anticipate, and our suggestions how to face them in the future. VoCol has been originally developed at Fraunhofer Institute IAIS in Bonn and from 2018 on will be evolved in collaboration by Fraunhofer IAIS and the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) – German National Library of Science and Technology in Hannover. It is based on Open Source software such as Java libraries and the Jena Fuseki SPARQL server, and requires nothing from the user but a standard Git-based repository. The application serves as a frontend in order to facilitate collaborative ontology development. It supports the Semantic Web standards OWL and SKOS, and features various functionalities such as a Turtle editor, a syntax validation routine, options for an automated documentation, tools for ontology visualization, evolution reports, content negotiation, and a SPARQL endpoint. VoCol is currently being tested at the TIB and by other VIVO-DE community members with the goal to assess its suitability for collaborative editing and management of the KDSF-VIVO-Alignment and VIVO-DE-Extension vocabularies. Despite the aforementioned benefits of VoCol, there is still room for improvement, for example regarding performance and a more intuitive user guidance. Moreover, VoCol could be taken to the next level by adding more functionalities such as more sophisticated structural validation and verification routines, and alignment tools that allow to establish mappings between several vocabularies.