Inproceedings,
Harvesting Wiki Consensus - Using Wikipedia Entries as Ontology Elements
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Semantic Wikis -- From Wiki To Semantics, ESWC2006, (June 2006)
Abstract
One major obstacle towards adding machine-readable annotation to
existing Web content is the lack of domain ontologies. While FOAF
and Dublin
Core are popular means for expressing relationships between Web resources
and between Web resources and literal values, we widely lack unique
identifiers
for common concepts and instances. Also, most available ontologies
have a
very weak community grounding in the sense that they are designed
by single
individuals or small groups of individuals, while the majority of
potential users
is not involved in the process of proposing new ontology elements
or achieving
consensus. This is in sharp contrast to natural language where the
evolution of
the vocabulary is under the control of the user community. At the
same time,
we can observe that, within Wiki communities, especially Wikipedia,
a large
number of users is able to create comprehensive domain representations
in the
sense of unique, machine-feasible, identifiers and concept definitions
which are
sufficient for humans to grasp the intension of the concepts. The
English
version of Wikipedia contains now more than one million entries and
thus the
same amount of URIs plus a human-readable description. While this
collection
is on the lower end of ontology expressiveness, it is likely the
largest living
ontology that is available today. In this paper, we (1) show that
standard Wiki
technology can be easily used as an ontology development environment
for
named classes, reducing entry barriers for the participation of users
in the
creation and maintenance of lightweight ontologies, (2) prove that
the URIs of
Wikipedia entries are surprisingly reliable identifiers for ontology
concepts, and
(3) demonstrate the applicability of our approach in a use case.
