Git4Voc: Git-based Versioning for Collaborative Vocabulary Development

TL;DR

This paper explores adapting Git, a popular version control system, for collaborative vocabulary development, addressing unique challenges and proposing guidelines and features like validation and semantic diffs.

Contribution

It introduces Git4Voc, a novel approach that customizes Git for vocabulary development, including vocabulary-specific features and guidelines for effective collaboration.

Findings

Git4Voc enables syntactic validation of vocabularies

Semantic diffs improve understanding of vocabulary changes

Guidelines facilitate adoption of Git in vocabulary projects

Abstract

Collaborative vocabulary development in the context of data integration is the process of finding consensus between the experts of the different systems and domains. The complexity of this process is increased with the number of involved people, the variety of the systems to be integrated and the dynamics of their domain. In this paper we advocate that the realization of a powerful version control system is the heart of the problem. Driven by this idea and the success of Git in the context of software development, we investigate the applicability of Git for collaborative vocabulary development. Even though vocabulary development and software development have much more similarities than differences there are still important differences. These need to be considered within the development of a successful versioning and collaboration system for vocabulary development. Therefore, this paper starts by presenting the challenges we were faced with during the creation of vocabularies collaboratively and discusses its distinction to software development. Based on these insights we propose Git4Voc which comprises guidelines how Git can be adopted to vocabulary development. Finally, we demonstrate how Git hooks can be implemented to go beyond the plain functionality of Git by realizing vocabulary-specific features like syntactic validation and semantic diffs.