Community-driven ontology construction in social networking portals

The goal of the work presented here is to introduce community-driven ontology management as a new approach to ontology construction and demonstrate the added value to community portals of being community driven. The three main parts of the work are (i) the development of a framework allowing and motivating collaborative ontology construction and reuse for the end users (a person or a community), (ii) building a prototype on the basis of this specification, namely the People’s portal, and (iii) the application of the developed infrastructure to scenarios in semantically-enhanced community portals with the involvement of real users. The development of the framework for community-driven ontology construction is aimed at enriching the established practices for ontology development and population with community-supporting features. The objective of community-driven ontology management is to provide the means and motivations for a large number of users to “weave” and adopt the Semantic Web. The People’s portal infrastructure allows end users to define the content structure (i.e., develop ontologies), to populate ontologies, and to define the ways in which the content is managed on various semantically-enhanced community portals where the infrastructure is applied. An analysis of the functionalities of existing (Semantic) Web community environments and the empirical results obtained in this work are indicative of its feasibility and of the advantages of community-driven ontology construction. In practice, the communities were capable of introducing on the community portals such ontology items as Classes, Subclasses, Properties, Instances, ontology mappings, and of reusing these items afterwards.