As knowledge engineering moves to the Semantic Web, ontologies become dynamic products of collaborative development rather than artifacts produced in a closed environment of a research group. However, the projects differ sometimes significantly—in the way that the community members contribute, the different roles that they play, the mechanisms that they use to carry out discussions and to achieve consensus. We are currently developing a flexible mechanism to support a wide range of collaborative workflows in the Protégé environment. In this paper, we describe our overall architecture for workflow support, which comprises an ontology for representing workflows for collaborative ontology development, a customizable ontology-development environment that our system generates based on a declarative description of a workflow, and a run-time integration with a workflow execution engine.
