community_driven_metadata_management

> The objective of community-driven ontology management is to provide means and motivations for a large number of users to 'weave' and adopt the Semantic Web via ontology management practices, constructing, matching, version ontologies in a community space. (O'Murchu, Zhdanova, & Breslin, 2007, //communities contributing// sect.)
 * Community driven metadata management for semantic community portals**

As I wrote in the summary of this vision: The vision of community driven metadata management //**proposes**// 'simple ontologies' (e.g. FOAF, vCard and RSS) can be used to build semantic community Web portals.

One component integral to the vision is the so called: "community ontology editing service," (Zhdanova, Krummenacher, Henke, & Fensel, 2005) The role of this service is to enable user to easily create and edit ontologies and ontology-instance data, that is, to define an instance where a particular object is a member a particular class, or place in the ontological hierarchy. [//provide example//]

Thus, the idea is that ordinary community members get to create and manage ontologies for their own purposes, (as opposed to being passive users off centrally engineered ontologies; see ontology engineering). According to the developers of the vision of community driven metadata management, engineered ontologies have the disadvantage in that they can be un-dynamic, and overly dependent on experts who are not members of a community: > When ontologies are constructed by external knowledge engineers, all the changes need to be captured and introduced by these engineers. With external knowledge experts, the delay in realizing and introducing the changes might take days, weeks or even months. This delay is unacceptable for many dynamic domains, where new terminology regularly and rapidly changes (e.g., business or sport). (Zhdanova, Krummenacher, Henke, & Fensel, 2005, sect. 2)

The community driven approach to metadata management (Zhdanova, AKrummenacher, Henke, & Fensel, 2005) stresses that the front-end (or user interface) of a semantic community portal needs to be deliberately user friendly. This should enable multiple users to use and create their own ontologies, and along the way observe consensus building and ontology evolution at work. In other words: > A Community Ontology Editing service should enable consensual editing for multiple users and tight integration with semantic publishing and delivery components, allowing the involved parties to observe the ontology evolution. (Zhdanova, AKrummenacher, Henke, & Fensel, 2005, sect. 2)

Here we could say, the vision of community driven metadata management is rather similar to the logic of communities of practice building their own shared artefacts, or Lucy Suchman’s description of the design and construction of a bridge by a team of civil engineers (see bridge building case study).

We could also observe that technologies that are both easy to use and in the public domain, stand a better chance of gaining technical acceptance and perhaps popularity, as is the case with integration of the FOAF ontology into blogging applications such as [|Wordpress], (Bruns, 2005).

Anna Zhdanova and her colleagues define semantic community portals as portals that "make use of Semantic Web technologies" to allow users to users to share terms, and "create connections between people and people and also between people and the information that they produce," (O'Murchu, Zhdanova, Breslin, 2007, intro. sect.).
 * What is a semantic community portal?**

The vision of community driven metadata management proposes the use of simple ontologies (e.g. vCard, FOAF, Dublin Core, RSS) to provide users with easy to uses semantic functionality.
 * Simple ontologies for semantic community portals**
 * vCard, and FOAF are 'person' ontologies;
 * Dublin Core, RSS are document/web publication ontologies (see Semantic Web fundamentals)

While FOAF and RSS are commonly used in blogs, vCard provides a standard data format for the exchange of personsal information (e.g. as electronic business cards). vCard is supported by many desktop e-mail clients ([|Wikipedia]), and online social networking services (SNS) (e.g. [|LinkedIn]).

O'Murchu, Zhdanova, and Breslin observe a recent increase in popularity of portals where that allow users to "create their own vocabularies and tag [images or web addresses, for example] with arbitrary keywords from their vocabularies," (2007, //communities contributing// sect.). While acknowledging that these portals are //not// based on ontologies or Semantic Web technologies, they believe the popularity of, for example [|del.icio.us]; [|www.43things.com]; [|www.flickr.com]; and [|base.google.com], is evidences of user demand for a Web that is "more structured and annotated in a community driven manner, via social processes and [the] contributions of regular web users," (2007, //communities contributing// sect.). They also point to [| Wikipedia] as a community portal that is highly structured, even though not semantic.
 * Technology trends**

As stated above, the vision of community driven metadata management is to provide the means and motivations for a large number of users to 'weave' semantically structured online content. What will it take? The means may come from adding semantic functionality to already popular applications such as Flickr (see faceted ontologies). The motivation is another matter. Why do so many blog, or use use application like [|www.flickr.com] and [|del.icio.us]? Why do some users add resumes to their profiles on ([|LinkedIn]) or other social networking services (SNS)? Surely these are questions not for technologists, but for social scientist?
 * What will it take to realise the vision of community driven metadata management?**

O'Murchu, Zhdanova, and Breslin point to the potential number of community members who they believe will become frustrated by the restrictions of pre-defined ontologies, surely a tiny percentage of Internet users indeed. To understand the motivation of those who like to use social tagging applications may require an all together different approach, perhaps one that asks what are the people in a community (if indeed there is a community) what are they aiming to do when they create their tags, as they share their electronic profiles, or as they use a (SNS) and become aware of the connections between friends of friends in their extended social networks?

[//insert pathways into answer some of these questions//] 1157597486


 * References**

Breslin, J. G., Decker, S., Harth, A., & Bojars, U. (2006). SIOC: An approach to connect web-based communities. //International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2//(2).

Bruns, A. (2005). //Gatewatching: Collaborative online news production//. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Neumann, M., O'Murchu, I., Breslin, J., Decker, S., Hogan, D., & MacDonaill, C. (2005). Semantic social network portal for enterprise online communities. //Journal of European Industrial Training (Special Edition), 29//(6).

O'Murchu, I., Zhdanova, A. V., & Breslin, J. (2007, forthcoming). Semantic community portals. In A. Tatnall (Ed.), //Encyclopedia of Portal Technologies and Applications//. Idea Group Publishing.

Wikipedia, (2006, September) //vCard//. Retrieved September 7, 2006 from [].

Zhdanova, A. V., Krummenacher, R., Henke, J., & Fensel, D. (2005, September 19-22). //Community-driven ontology management: DERI case study//. Paper presented at the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, Compiegne, France.

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