An Approach to Ontology Construction: and Its Application to Community Portals

The goal of the work presented here is to identify current limitations of community portals, introduce community-driven ontology management as a new approach to ontology construction and demonstrate the added value to community portals of being community-driven. The three main parts of the work are (i) the development of a framework allowing and motivating collaborative ontology construction and reuse for the end users (a person and a community), (ii) building a prototype on the basis of this specification, namely the People's portal, and (iii) the application of the developed infrastructure to scenarios in semantically-enhanced community portals with the involvement of real users. The development of the framework for community-driven ontology management is aimed at enriching with community-supporting features the established practices for ontology management in the areas of ontology development and population, storage, matching and versioning. The objective of community-driven ontology management is to provide the means and motivations for a large number of users to "weave" and adopt the Semantic Web.