A Large Scale Distributed Knowledge Organization System

The revolution of Internet and the Web takes the computer and information technology into a new age. The information on the web is growing very fast. The progress of information and communication technologies has made accessible a large amount of information, which have provided each of us with access to far more information than we can comprehend or manage. This emphasizes the difficulty with the resulting semantic heterogeneity of the diverse sources. Human knowledge is a living organism and as such evolves in time where different people having different viewpoints and using different terminology among people of different cultures and languages, intensify the heterogeneity of the sources even more. These introduce some concrete problems like natural language disambiguation, information retrieval and information integration. Nevertheless, the problem is quite well known in almost every branch of knowledge and has been independently approached by several communities for several decades. To make this huge amount of existing information accessible and manageable while also solving the semantic heterogeneity problem, namely the problem of diversity in knowledge, and therefore support interoperability, it is essential to have a large scale high quality collaborative knowledge base along with a suitable structure as a common ground on which interoperability among people and different systems should be possible. It will play the role of a reference point for communication, assigning clear meaning by accurate disambiguation to exchanged information, communication and automating complex tasks. However, successfully building large scale knowledge bases with maximum coverage is not possible by a single person or a small group of people without collaborative support. It extremely depends on expert community based support. Therefore, it is necessary for experts to work together on knowledge base building. Furthermore, it is very natural that these expert users will be geographically distributed. Web 2.0 has the potential to support information sharing, interoperability and collaboration on the Web. Simplicity, flexibility and easy to use services make it an interactive and collaborative platform which allows them to create or edit their content. The exponential expansion of the Web users and the potentials of Web 2.0 make it the natural platform of choice for developing knowledge bases collaboratively. We propose a highly flexible knowledge base system, which takes into account diversity of knowledge and its evolution in time. The work presented in this thesis is part of a larger project. More specifically the goal of this thesis is to create a powerful and easy to use knowledge base management system to help people in building, organizing a high quality knowledge base and making accessible their knowledge and to support interoperability in real world scenarios.