TermFactory: Collaborative Editing of Term Ontologies

In our paper, we describe TermFactory, which is an architecture and workflow for collaborative ontology-based terminology and ontology work.. TermFactory (TF) is being developed in the ContentFactory project (2008−2010), carried out at several departments of the University of Helsinki and Helsinki University of Technology. The TF architecture is built on Semantic Web ontologies and other web standard technologies. The architecture defines a schema for representing terminologies as OWL ontologies, software for distributed storage and retrieval of term resources, and web services that provide methods to query, discuss, and edit terms on various collaborative platforms. TF Quality Manual proposes best practices for collaborative terminology work. Making use of the fact that OWL is weakly typed, TF accommodates a variety of approaches to terminological description, implemented as TF profiles. In addition to the traditional concept-oriented entry view TF also supports a number of alternative views, e.g. a “contrastive view” which is particularly suitable for terminology work in culture-specific domains and domains dealing with sensitive matters (such as social work, politics or diplomacy). We also discuss the benefits and challenges of collaborative terminology work and describe the principles of an upper-level infrastructure for documenting terminological data, including a common register of language codes, a core domain classification, a list of upper-level data categories and means of source management. This infrastructure glues heterogeneous content together while allowing for the diversity of data models in different terminological collections.