VoColReg: A Registry for Supporting Distributed Ontology Development using Version Control Systems

The number of ontologies used for different purposes, such as data integration, information retrieval or search optimization, is constantly increasing. Therefore, it is crucial that ontologies can be developed and explored in an easy way by humans, and are accessible by intelligent agents. To this end, we created VoColReg on top of the VoCol platform. VoColReg provides an integrated registry that hosts VoCol instances, allowing the community to access, browse, reuse, and improve ontologies in a collaborative fashion. VoColReg integrates several improved features, such as syntax validation realized by RIM Doctor, which is able to simultaneously identify a comprehensive list of syntax errors and automatically correct a subset of them. Currently, the VoColReg platform hosts more than 21 ontologies from various domains, where nine of them are publicly available. We analyzed those nine ontologies to discover different facts about them such as hosting platforms used, expressivity of the ontologies, number of triples and modules.