WebScripter: Grass-Roots Ontology Alignment via End-User Report Creation

Ontologies define hierarchies of classes and attributes; they are meta-data: data about data. In the "traditional approach" to ontology engineering, experts add new data by carefully analyzing others' ontologies and fitting their new concepts into the existing hierarchy. In the emerging "Semantic Web approach", ordinary users may not look at anyone's ontology before creating theirs - instead, they may simply define a new local schema from scratch that addresses their immediate needs, without worrying if and how their data may some day integrate with others' data. This paper describes WebScripter, a tool for translating between the countless mini-ontologies that the "Semantic Web approach" yields. In our approach, ordinary users graphically align data from multiple sources in a simple spreadsheet-like view without having to know anything about ontologies. The resulting web of equivalency statements is then mined by WebScripter to help users find related ontologies and data, and to automatically align the related data with their own.