Boosting Collaborative Ontology Building with Key-Concept Extraction

We present a wiki-based collaborative environment for the semi-automatic incremental building of ontologies. The system relies on an existing platform, which has been extended with a component for terminology extraction from domain-specific textual corpora and with a further step aimed at matching the extracted concepts with pre-existing structured and semi-structured information. The system stands on the shoulders of a well-established user-friendly wiki architecture and it enables knowledge engineers and domain experts to collaborate in the ontology building process. We have performed a task-oriented evaluation of the tool in a real use case for incrementally constructing the missing part of an environmental ontology. The tool effectively supported the users in the task, thus showing its usefulness for knowledge extraction and ontology engineering.