Draft Version: Navigational Knowledge Engineering A New Paradigm Enabling Knowledge Engineering by the Masses

This is a draft version. Knowledge Engineering is a costly, tedious and often time-consuming task, for which light-weight processes are desperately needed. In this paper, we present a new paradigm Navigational Knowledge Engineering (NKE) to address this problem by producing structured knowledge as a result of users navigating through a system. Thereby, NKE reduces the costs for creating knowledge by disguising it as navigation. We introduce and define the Navigational Knowledge Engineering paradigm and demonstrate it in three different systems: 1.) a proof-of-concept system which creates OWL class expressions based on users navigating in a collection of resources, 2.) a plugin for generating recommendations in an e-commerce context, and 3.) a SPARQL based query answering system. The overall contribution of this paper is twofold: (i) it introduces a novel paradigm for knowledge engineering and (ii) it provides evidence for its technical feasibility.