Generally there are at least four roles what need to participate and interact in the development and maintenance of an ontology:

• Content contributors such as Geographers and Geo Scientists

• Domain experts who may work with content providers to capture material and check its quality using existing sources and established methods such as logical consistence, provenance etc.

• Knowledge or ontological engineers who build a formal ontology using tools and a ontology language

• Research ontologists who help develop solutions for representational and ontological quality issues

Beyond these general roles there are tasks such as mapping data to ontologies and ontologies to ontologies that may require interaction between the roles.