Abstract
Vocabularies are increasingly being developed on platforms for hosting version-controlled repositories, such as GitHub. However, these platforms lack important features that have proven useful in vocabulary development. We present VoCol, an integrated environment that supports the development of vocabularies using Version Control Systems. VoCol is based on a fundamental model of vocabulary development, consisting of the three core activities modeling, population, and testing. We implemented VoCol using a loose coupling of validation, querying, analytics, visualization, and documentation generation components on top of a standard Git repository. All components, including the version-controlled repository, can be configured and replaced with little effort to cater for various use cases. We demonstrate the applicability of VoCol with a real-world example and report on a user study that confirms its usability and usefulness.
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Notes
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In this work, the term “vocabulary” is used to refer to lightweight ontologies, as they are developed in initiatives like schema.org and defined by the W3C [23].
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A live demo of VoCol is available at http://vocol.visualdataweb.org.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the context of the projects LUCID (grant no. 01IS14019C), SDI-X (no. 01IS15035C) and Industrial Data Space (no. 01IS15054).
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Halilaj, L. et al. (2016). VoCol: An Integrated Environment to Support Version-Controlled Vocabulary Development. In: Blomqvist, E., Ciancarini, P., Poggi, F., Vitali, F. (eds) Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. EKAW 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10024. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49004-5_20
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