A Tool for Collaborative Ontology Construction . We have developed a set of tools and services to support the process of achieving consensus on common shared ontologies by geographically distributed groups.
Users can quickly assemble a new ontology from a library of modules.
We discuss how our system was constructed, how it exploits existing protocols and browsing tools, and our experience supporting hundreds of users. We describe applications using our tools to achieve con-sensus on ontologies and to integrate information. Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing , T. R. Gruber, in Formal Ontology in Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation , Nicola Guarino and Roberto Poli, editors, Kluwer Academic, in preparation. Original paper presented at the International Workshop on Formal Ontology , March 1993. Recent work in Artificial Intelligence is exploring the use of formal ontologies as a way of specifying content-specific agreements for the sharing and reuse of knowledge among software entities.