Survey of tools for collaborative knowledge construction and sharing

The fast growth and spread of Web 2.0 environments have demonstrated the great willingness of general Web users to contribute and share various type of content and information. Many very successful web sites currently exist which thrive on the wisdom of the crowd, where web users in general are the sole data providers and curators. The Semantic Web calls for knowledge to be semantically represented using ontologies to allow for better access and sharing of data. However, constructing ontologies collaboratively is not well supported by most existing ontology and knowledge-base editing tools. This has resulted in the recent emergence of a new range of collaborative ontology construction tools with the aim of integrating some Web 2.0 features into the process of structured knowledge construction. This paper provides a survey of the start of the art of these tools, and highlights their significant features and capabilities

The CKC Challenge: Exploring Tools for Collaborative Knowledge Construction

The great success of Web 2.0 is mainly fuelled by an infrastructure that allows web users to create, share, tag, and connect content and knowledge easily. The tools for developing structured knowledge in this manner have started to appear as well. However, there are few, if any, user studies that are aimed at understanding what users expect from such tools, what works and what doesn't. We organized the Collaborative Knowledge Construction (CKC) Challenge to assess the state of the art for the tools that support collaborative processes for creation of various forms of structured knowledge. The goal of the Challenge was to get users to try out different tools and to learn what users expect from such tools /features that users need, features that they like or dislike. The Challenge task was to construct structured knowledge for a portal that would provide information about research. The Challenge design contained several incentives for users to participate. Forty-nine users registered for the Challenge; thirty three of them participated actively by using the tools. We collected extensive feedback from the users where they discussed their thoughts on all the tools that they tried. In this paper, we present the results of the Challenge, discuss the features that users expect from tools for collaborative knowledge constructions, the features on which Challenge participants disagreed, and the lessons that we learned

A community based approach for managing ontology alignments

The Semantic Web is rapidly becoming a defacto distributed repository for semantically represented data, thus leveraging on the added on value of the network effect. Various ontology mapping techniques and tools have been devised to facilitate the bridging and integration of distributed data repositories. Nevertheless, ontology mapping can benefitfrom human supervision to increase accuracy of results. The spread of Web 2.0 approaches demonstrate the possibility of using collaborative techniques for reaching consensus. While a number of prototypes for collaborative ontology construction are being developed, collaborative ontology mapping is not yet well investigated. In this paper, we describe a prototype that combines off-the-shelf ontology mapping tools with social software techniques to enable users to collaborate on mapping ontologies

A community based approach to managing ontology alignments

The Semantic Web is rapidly becoming a defacto distributed repository for semantically represented data, thus leveraging on the added on value of the network effect. Various ontology mapping techniques and tools have been devised to facilitate the bridging and integration of distributed data repositories. Nevertheless, ontology mapping can benefit from human supervision to increase accuracy of results. The spread of Web 2.0 approaches demonstrate the possibility of using collaborative techniques for reaching consensus. While a number of prototypes for collaborative ontology construction are being developed, collaborative ontology mapping is not yet well investigated. In this paper, we describe a prototype that combines off-the-shelf ontology mapping tools with social software techniques to enable users to collaborate on mapping ontologies

Semantic reasoning for intelligent emergency response applications

Emergency response applications require the processing of large amounts of data, generated by a diverse set of sensors and devices, in order to provide for an accurate and concise view of the situation at hand. The adoption of semantic technologies allows for the definition of a formal domain model and intelligent data processing and reasoning on this model based on generated device and sensor measurements. This paper presents a novel approach to emergency response applications, such as fire fighting, integrating a formal semantic domain model into an event-based decision support system, which supports reasoning on this model. The developed model consists of several generic ontologies describing concepts and properties which can be applied to diverse context-aware applications. These are extended with emergency response specific ontologies. Additionally, inference on the model performed by a reasoning engine is dynamically synchronized with the rest of the architectural components. This allows to automatically trigger events based on predefined conditions. The proposed ontology and developed reasoning methodology is validated on two scenarios, i.e. (i) the construction of an emergency response incident and corresponding scenario and (ii) monitoring of the state of a fire fighter during an emergency response

CONGAS: a collaborative ontology development framework based on Named GrAphS

The process of ontology development involves a range of skills and know-how often requiring team work of different people, each of them with his own way of contributing to the definition and formalization of the domain representation. For this reason, collaborative development is an important feature for ontology editing tools, and should take into account the different characteristics of team participants, provide them with a dedicated working environment allowing to express their ideas and creativity, still protecting integrity of the shared work. In this paper we present CONGAS, a collaborative version of the Knowledge Management and Acquisition platform Semantic Turkey which, exploiting the potentialities brought by recent introduction of context management into RDF triple graphs, offers a collaborative environment where proposals for ontology evolution can emerge and coexist, be evaluated by team users, trusted across different perspectives and eventually converged into the main development stream

Étude de l'évolution du modèle de l'utilisateur des systèmes de construction collaborative d'ontologies

National audienceCet article rend compte d'une étude en cours sur l'évolution du modèle de l'utilisateur de systèmes de construction collaborative d'ontologies. Par modèle de l'utilisateur (ou modèle du contributeur), nous entendons la représentation que les concepteurs se font des utilisateurs de leurs systèmes et plus généralement des contributeurs à la construction des ontologies. Nous décrivons : 1) la méthode que nous utilisons pour étudier l'évolution du modèle de l'utilisateur ; 2) l'évolution de ce modèle (en termes de types d'utilisateurs, de caractérisations de l'utilisateur et de caractérisations de l'environnement de l'utilisateur) ; 3) les évolutions parallèles : a) des méthodes de conception des systèmes collaboratifs ; b) des systèmes eux-mêmes ; et c) des méthodes de construction collaborative des ontologies. Nous mentionnons quelques perspectives d'évolution envisagées par les concepteurs eux-mêmes. Cette étude vise à faire ressortir l'importance d'acquérir une meilleure connaissance des contributeurs potentiels à la construction collaborative des ontologies afin d'obtenir des outils collaboratifs mieux adaptés à ces contributeurs