Abstract: It is well-established that crafting ontologies has become a teamwork activity, as it requires a range of knowledge and skills hardly findable all together in a single person. For this reason collaborative aspects in ontology modeling have been investigated, and several works to support and enhance collaboration in this context have been presented. The requirements and features that have emerged from these studies highlight the need to support collaboration in an articulated way: from supporting the collaboration between who understands the domain to be represented (the Domain Expert, or DE) and who has proper expertise in ontology modeling (the Knowledge Engineer, or KE), to supporting communication, discussion, and decision making between (geographically) distributed teams of ontology contributors.

Keywords: The Knowledge Engineer, or KE, The Domain Expert, or DE.