Distributed Ontology Development with "Hozo"

Abstract

This paper describes a method for distributed ontology development and its implementation. In addition to the discussion on general distributed development, we especially focus on how to keep the consistency of sub-ontologies as a whole. Its method is based on the management of the dependency between concepts definitions in the sub-ontologies. Aiming at supporting of distributed ontology development comprehensively, we design and implement a prototype system in "Hozo" which has been developed by the authors as a support system for constructing and using ontology.