Human Computation for Ontology Refinement

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Date
2008-06
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Publisher
The British University in Dubai (BUiD)
Abstract
Ontology plays an important role in enabling the Semantic Web. Ontologies are used to represent a shared and common understanding of a domain of interest. The main bottleneck is knowledge acquisition in a dynamic environment like the Web. There are several projects that attempts to collect commonsense knowledge, but none of them has explored how to present and use this knowledge in real life. This project explores the possibility of using human computation concepts to devise an online game that enables people to contribute to the process of generating Semantic Web ontologies.The project presents the Ontology Re nement System which generates ontologies from the knowledge acquired by the online game. The system is divided into three main components. The rst component is the Online Game which is used as a tool to collect commonsense knowledge from a large community of people. The second component is the Ontology Builder which represents an algorithm used to illustrate how to process and transfer the knowledge collected into a set of statements. This component is the prime contribution of the project. The third component in the system is the Ontology Representation Generator which takes the set of statements produced by the second component and generates OWL ontology les using Jena API. An experiment has been conducted to evaluate the e ciency of the Ontology Re nement System. Three different ontologies were produced by the system from the knowledge collected during the experiment. A survey about the ontologies produced by the experiment has been sent randomly to Internet users to measure the accuracy of these ontologies. The survey results in a good agreement from the Internet users on the ontologies produced. The ontologies that are produced by the Ontology Re nement System are particularly rel- evant to domains in which ontologies change over time such as electronic commerce. Ontologies can be used to maintain a constantly evolving and improving product catalogue. A good product catalogue can make it easier for people to navigate the available products to find information.
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DISSERTATION WITH DISTINCTION
Keywords
ontology, ontology refinement system, commonsense knowledge, semantic web
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