Plow: A Novel Approach to Interlinking Modular Ontologies Based on Software Package Management

Abstract

Ontology development offers many challenges, with some of the most prominent being modularization and evolution of ontologies over time. Based on lessons learned from popular programming language package managers, we present a novel approach to package management of OWL ontologies. Most prominently we integrate a dependency resolution algorithm based on the popular SemVer versioning scheme with tooling support for dependency locking, which allows for decoupling publication and consumption of ontologies, reducing the need for coordination in ontology evolution. To complete our unified approach, we additionally provide an integrated registry, which serves as a domain-agnostic repository for ontologies (https://registry.field33.com).