Enhancing WebProtégé with Version Control Systems

Enhancing WebProtégé with Version Control Systems

연구 분야: Software Development

학회: International Knowledge Graph and Semantic Web Conference

Collaborative ontology editors and modern version control systems (VCS, such as GitHub or GitLab) have a prominent role among the best practices of ontology development process. Integrating VCS functionality into collaborative ontology editors is essential for an effective and seamless ontology development workflow. Unfortunately, such an integration is not present in the current landscape of openly licensed software yet. In this study, we aim to bridge this gap between collaborative ontology development and VCS by adding the most common version control workflows into the widely used open-source editor WebProtégé. These common workflows are mostly based on steps such as add, commit, push, clone, checkout and branch commands that can be executed by the REST API or command line of a VCS for a particular repository. Our solution includes associating WebProtégé users with VCS users based on personal access tokens for authenticated utilization of VCS REST APIs, harmonization and abstraction of the non-standard VCS REST API calls into the most common VCS workflows and integrating these workflows into WebProtégé using service and servlet components as well as a convenient Graphical User Interface (GUI). The solution is compatible with the most popular versioning environment GitHub alongside its open-source equivalent GitLab and is evaluated by its users based on the System Usability Scale (SUS) approach in the scope of this study. The service is publicly available at http://service.tib.eu/wp4tib and the code base can be found at https://github.com/TIBHannover/webprotege.