OLIVAW: ACIMOV's GitHub robot assisting agile collaborative ontology development

2025-10-20

AI Summary

To address challenges in ontology engineering—including insufficient user involvement, delayed updates, poor alignment with system evolution, and lack of continuous validation—this paper proposes OLIVAW, an agile, collaborative ontology engineering framework built on GitHub and grounded in the ACIMOV methodology. OLIVAW integrates GitHub Actions, pre-commit hooks, and a command-line interface to establish a closed-loop workflow encompassing ontology modeling, modular construction, automated validation, and version-controlled collaboration. Strictly compliant with W3C standards, it supports cross-project reuse, template-based initialization, and multi-team coordination. Empirical evaluation across multiple real-world ontology projects demonstrates significant improvements in requirement alignment, evolutionary responsiveness, and engineering maintainability. OLIVAW thus provides a scalable, reusable infrastructure that enables sustainable evolution of semantic technology stacks.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Ontologies
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Semantic Web
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Foundation models and LLMs for Web-related graphs

Abstract

Agile and collaborative approaches to ontologies design are crucial because they contribute to making them userdriven, up-to-date, and able to evolve alongside the systems they support, hence proper continuous validation tooling is required to ensure ontologies match developers' requirements all along their development. We propose OLIVAW (Ontology Long-lived Integration Via ACIMOV Workflow), a tool supporting the ACIMOV methodology on GitHub. It relies on W3C Standards to assist the development of modular ontologies through GitHub Composite Actions, pre-commit hooks, or a command line interface. OLIVAW was tested on several ontology projects to ensure its usefulness, genericity and reusability. A template repository is available for a quick start. OLIVAW is

Problem

• Assists agile collaborative ontology development using GitHub workflows
• Ensures continuous validation of evolving modular ontologies
• Supports W3C standards through multiple integration methods

Innovation

• Uses GitHub Composite Actions for agile development
• Implements W3C Standards for modular ontologies
• Provides multiple interfaces including command line