Decentralized Collaborative Knowledge Management Using Git

Abstract

The World Wide Web and the Semantic Web are designed as a network of distributed services and datasets. The distributed character of the Web brings manifold collaborative possibilities to interchange data. The commonly adopted collaborative solutions for RDF data are centralized (e. g. SPARQL endpoints and wiki systems). But to support distributed collaboration, a system is needed, that supports divergence of datasets, brings the possibility to conflate diverged states, and allows distributed datasets to be synchronized. In this paper, we present Quit Store, it was inspired by and it builds upon the successful Git system. The approach is based on a formal expression of evolution and consolidation of distributed datasets. During the collaborative curation process, the system automatically versions the RDF dataset and tracks provenance information. It also provides support to branch, merge, and synchronize distributed RDF datasets. The merging process is guarded by specific merge strategies for RDF data. Finally, we use our reference implementation to show overall good performance and demonstrate the practical usability of the system. (Edgard Marx) URL: http://aksw.org/NatanaelArndt (Natanael Arndt), http://aksw.org/NormanRadtke (Norman Radtke), http://aksw.org/MichaelMartin (Michael Martin), http://aksw.org/EdgardMarx (Edgard Marx) 1 http://lod-cloud.net/ 2

Ontology engineering methodologies for the evolution of living and reused ontologies: status, trends, findings and recommendations

“…Representative approaches are included in Rebele et al (2016), Calbimonte et al (2017), Narula et al (2018), Salatino et al (2018), Tommasini et al (2018) and in the recent related work of Arndt et al (2019).…”

Decentralized but Globally Coordinated Biodiversity Data

“…It is therefore essential to extend current implementations to incorporate semantically-aware conflict detection and reconciliation between datasets with different metadata classification systems. Current state of the art relies on a supervised approach to identify and handle cases where users have made changes to parallel copies of data records (e.g., Arndt et al, 2019 ).…”

“…Inspired by big science efforts like the Human Genome Project, major biodiversity initiatives have set the goal of aggregating all data about where and when different biological entities-most typically "species" in our context-are located, in order to provide critical insight into global problems such as rapid biodiversity loss and climate change (Peterson et al, 2010;Devictor and Bensaude-Vincent, 2016;IPBES, 2019;Wagner, 2020). However, there are an exceptionally large and heterogeneous set of stakeholders for this emerging biodiversity knowledge commons (Adams et al, 2002;Strandburg et al, 2017), making effective governance a critical, ongoing challenge (Alphandéry andFortier, 2010, Turnhout et al, 2014). The present moment marks a pivotal opportunity to examine how a new, decentralized approach may better provide the "flexibility both to accommodate and to benefit from this diversity [of contributors], rather than seeking to implement a prescriptive programme of planned deliverables" (Hobern et al, 2019, p. 9)-as recommended by a recent report from the second Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference.…”

DBpedia Archivo: A Web-Scale Interface for Ontology Archiving Under Consumer-Oriented Aspects

“…The semantic diff of Archivo based on (OWL) axiom diffs goes a step further. Quit [ 2 ] implements an RDF versioning and collaboration system on top of Git. It provides unified access via SPARQL 1.1 on each version of an ontology and the versioning history.…”