myOntology : The Marriage of Ontology Engineering and Collective Intelligence

Despite very active research on ontologies, only few useful ontologies can be found on the Web. The reasons for this are manifold, but a major obstacle is that ontology engineering environments impose high entrance barriers on users, and that the community does not have control over the ontology evolution. Wikis are a way to allow a wide range of users to contribute to Web representations without requiring more than basic Web editing skills. In the myOntology project, we propose the use of wiki technology in order to enable collaborative and community-driven ontology building by giving users with no or little expertise in ontology engineering the opportunity to contribute. In this paper, we describe the myOntology project in which the challenges of collaborative, community-driven, and wiki-based ontology engineering are investigated. Our approach combines the simplicity of wikis with intuitive visualization techniques and small yet efficient helper functionality plus consensus finding support exploiting the collective intelligence of a community.