WebScripter: World-Wide Grass-roots OntologyTranslation via Implicit End-User Alignment

Ontologies define hierarchies of classes and attributes; they are meta-data: data about data. XML Schema and RDF Schema are both (lightweight) ontology definition languages in that sense. In the “traditional” approach to ontology engineering, experts add new data by carefully analyzing others’ ontologies and fitting their new concepts into the existing hierarchy. In the emerging “Semantic Web” approach to ontology engineering, ordinary users may not look at anyone’s ontology before creating theirs – instead, they may simply define a new local schema from scratch that addresses their immediate needs, without worrying how their data may some day integrate with others’. This paper describes an approach and implemented system for translating between the countless mini-ontologies that the Semantic Web approach yields. In this approach, ordinary users graphically align data from multiple sources in a simple spreadsheet-like view without having to know anything about ontologies or even taxonomies. The resulting web of equivalency statements can then be mined to help other users find related ontologies and data, and to automatically align the data with theirs.