A Community based Approach for Managing Ontology Alignments

The Semantic Web is rapidly becoming a defacto distributed repository for semantically represented data, thus leveraging on the added on value of the network effect. Various ontology mapping techniques and tools have been devised to facilitate the bridging and integration of dis- tributed data repositories. Nevertheless, ontology mapping can benefit from human supervision to increase accuracy of results. The spread of Web 2.0 approaches demonstrate the possibility of using collaborative techniques for reaching consensus. While a number of prototypes for col- laborative ontology construction are being developed, collaborative on- tology mapping is not yet well investigated. In this paper, we describe a prototype that combines off-the-shelf ontology mapping tools with social software techniques to enable users to collaborate on mapping ontologies.