Abstract
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. The first is about image-based ontology engineering (introducing
so-called imagenotions), the second about ontology-enabled social
bookmarking (SOBOLEO). Both of them are inspired by lightweight Web
2.0 approaches and allow for realtime collaboration.
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