Even though ontologies are widely regarded as the backbone of the Semantic Web and the research in the area is very active, only few well-maintained and useful ontologies can be found when searching the Web. The reasons for this phenomenon are discussed in [1] who identifies four bottlenecks: first, many relevant domains of discourse are subject to a high degree of conceptual dynamics. Second, using and building ontologies is not reasonable if the cost of building an ontology is higher than its benefit. Third, a prerequisite for using an ontology and thus committing to its view of the world is to exactly understand its exact ontological commitment and the meaning of concepts and relations. This is hampered by the fact that most ontologies are built by a group of engineers and the user community does not have control over the evolution of the ontology due to the lack of efficient tool support for a broad audience with only limited ontology engineering skills. Fourth, existing standards specifications and all kinds of controlled vocabularies, which ontologies could re-use, are subject to intellectual property rights.
A community-oriented approach has several advantages towards an isolated,
engineeringoriented approach: A community can keep up with the pace of conceptual dynamics in a
domain more easily and it is cheaper for a community to collaboratively work on a
specification of an ontology than for a group of ontology engineers as the workload is
spread amongst the members. Finally, a community-agreed specification of a
conceptualization will more likely be used and further developed. The idea of wikis is to
allow a wide range of users to contribute to the content of the Web without requiring
more than basic Web editing skills. The enormous success of the online encyclopedia
Wikipedia1 has proven the efficiency of wiki infrastructure. In my thesis, I take the
following approach to collaborative and open ontology building tackling the problem of
ontology maintenance in dynamic domains: I propose (
The related work can be divided into the following areas: Collaborative ontology engineering: [3] describes Tadzebao and WebOnto. [4] describe the DILIGENT knowledge process where ontology evolution and collaborative concept mapping are applied to deal with conceptual dynamics of domains. The ontology editor Protégé2 is also available in a Web version [5]. Semantic Wikis: [6] describe Makna, a Wiki engine 1 http://wikipedia.org/ 2 http://protege.stanford.edu/ that was extended with generic ontology-driven components that allow collaborative authoring, querying, and browsing Semantic Web information. IkeWiki [7] allows annotating links, typing of pages, and context dependent content adaptation. Platypus Wiki [8] aims at augmenting a wiki with semantics. The main difference to my thesis is that existing approaches aim at augmenting existing wiki content with semantics instead of using a wiki-like infrastructure as an environment for collaboratively building ontologies.
In my thesis, on which I have been working for five months now, I commit to the
following research methodology: (
The approach towards ontology building described in this paper is supposed to enable
more users to contribute to the creation and maintenance of ontologies by (
Acknowledgments. This work has been funded by the Austrian BMVIT/FFG under the FIT-IT project myOntology (grant no. 812515/9284).