Social Support for Ontological Mediation and Data Integration

Most organisations store their data in several databases with no flexible mechanism for integration and access, and with no common vocabulary in place. Maintaining local vocabularies while realising distributed access is a challenge that most organisations face regularly. For several years, the Semantic Web community has been developing algorithms for mapping data models (ontologies). Nevertheless, ontology mapping remains to be a great challenge, and humans are always expected to verify the results of existing automatic mapping tools. The spread of social web demonstrate the possibility of using collaborative techniques for reaching consensus and fostering user participation. While a number of prototypes for collaborative ontology construction are being developed, collaborative ontology mapping is not yet well investigated. In this article, the authors describe an approach that combines off-the-shelf ontology mapping tools with social software techniques to enable users to collaborate on mapping ontologies.