Valentin's Blog

Most of the current methodologies for building ontologies rely on specialized knowledge engineers. This is in contrast to real-world settings, where the need for maintenance of domain specific ontologies emerges in the daily work of users. But in order to allow for participatory ontology engineering, we need to have a more realistic conceptual model of how ontologies develop in the real world. We introduce the ontology maturing processes which is based on the insight that ontology engineering is a collaborative informal learning process and for which we analyze characteristic evolution steps and triggers that have users engage in ontology engineering within their everyday work processes. This model integrates tagging and folksonomies with formal ontologies and shows maturing pathways between them. As implementations of this model, we present two case studies and the corresponding tools.

This paper was accepted to the workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge @ WWW2007 (authors are Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt, Andreas Walter, Gabor Nagypal and me). You can read the complete text here.

It got pretty good reviews, so you might actually want to read it :)

Labels: publication, SOBOLEO