Evolving and validating annotations in web-based collaborative environments through ontology matching

The research presented in this paper describes an automated approach for extracting concepts from annotated shared contents within a collaborative web environment, and matching them with domain ontologies. Feedback on the domain ontology suitability for the environment purposes is provided as a result of the automatic matching between the domain ontology and the free tags that users of the system employ. This approach will enable annotations and domain ontologies to evolve coherently with the real use of any social web environment. Experiments carried out on the Knowledge Practice Environment of the EU-funded project KP-Lab demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.