Evaluating Wiki Collaborative Features in Ontology Authoring

It is nowadays well-established that the construction of quality domain ontologies benefits from the involvement in the modelling process of more actors, possibly having different roles and skills. To be effective, the collaboration between these actors has to be fostered, enabling each of them to actively and readily participate to the development of the ontology, favouring as much as possible the direct involvement of the domain experts in the authoring activities. Recent works have shown that ontology modelling tools based on wikis’ paradigm and technology could contribute in meeting these collaborative requirements. This paper investigates, both at the theoretical and empirical level, the effectiveness of wiki features for collaborative ontology authoring in supporting teamworks composed of domain experts and knowledge engineers, as well as their impact on the entire process of collaborative ontology modelling and entity lifecycle.