COLLABORATIVE DEVELOPMENT OF LARGE - SCALE BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGIES - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 195

that is also retrieved via Web service calls to BioPortal. The Reference portlet
is also confi gurable. For example, a user can specify in what particular ontology
from BioPortal the search should be performed.
A user may also restrict the search to a particular ontology branch when
confi guring the portlet (e.g., the Anatomy branch in SNOMED-CT).
Once the user clicks on the Import button, a reference to the term in the
external ontology is created. The reference will have metadata associated with
it: the name of the source ontology, the identifi er of the referenced term, and
a direct Web link to the term.

12.4 COLLABORATION ARCHITECTURE

A high-level overview of the collaboration infrastructure used in Collaborative
Prot é g é and WebProt é g é is shown in Figure 12.9 . The collaboration framework
is the core of the system and provides all collaboration services. Collaborative
Prot é g é and WebProt é g é are client applications that access the collaboration
framework and display the relevant information.
The entire collaboration process is guided by a set of “meta”-ontologies
that are part of the collaboration framework. The ChAO provides support for
storing a structured log of ontology changes together with the metadata as
well as notes and discussions represented as instances of predefi ned classes

Figure 12.9 Collaboration architecture for Collaborative Prot é g é and WebProt é g é .
The collaboration framework (left side) provides all collaboration services used by the
Collaborative Prot é g é rich client and WebProt é g é . Ontologies guide the entire collabo-
ration process. A layer of Java APIs provides access to the collaboration information.
The ontology repository stores the ontologies available for collaboration.