A knowledge base driven user interface for collaborative ontology development

Scientists and researchers often use ontologies to describe their data, to share and integrate this data from heterogeneous sources. Ontologies are formal computer models that describe the main concepts and their relationships in a particular domain. Ontologies are usually authored by a community of users with different roles and levels of expertise. To support collaboration among distributed teams and to provision for distinct authoring requirements of each of the user roles and of individual users, we designed a configurable Web-based ontology editor, WebProtege. WebProtege extends Protege, a widely popular ontology editor with more than 150,000 registered users. The user interface layout and configuration for WebProtege is model-based and declarative: we represent it in a knowledge base, with an ontology defining its structure, and linking the interface configuration to the users, their roles, and access policies. We will discuss how the knowledge base driven configuration of the user interface supports the reuse and modularization of layout configurations. Such configuration is also highly flexible and extensible, and is easier to manage than many traditional approaches.