Crowd-Sourcing Fuzzy and Faceted Classification for Concept Search

Searching for concepts in science and technology is often a difficult task. To facilitate concept search, different types of human-generated metadata have been created to define the content of scientific and technical disclosures. Classification schemes such as the International Patent Classification (IPC)1 and MEDLINE's MeSH2 are structured and controlled, but require trained experts and central management to restrict ambiguity (Mork, 2013). While unstructured tags of folksonomies can be processed to produce a degree of structure (Kalendar, 2010; Karampinas, 2012; Sarasua, 2012; Bragg, 2013) the freedom enjoyed by the crowd typically results in less precision (Stock 2007).