A generic framework for collaborative multi‐perspective ontology acquisition
| Pages | 145-159 |
| Published date | 23 February 2010 |
| Date | 23 February 2010 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011024173 |
| Author | Maayan Zhitomirsky‐Geffet,Judit Bar‐Ilan,Yitzchak Miller,Snunith Shoham |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
A generic framework for
collaborative multi-perspective
ontology acquisition
Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet, Judit Bar-Ilan, Yitzchak Miller and
Snunith Shoham
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a general framework that incorporates
collaborative social tagging with a novel ontology scheme conveying multiple perspectives.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper proposes a framework where multiple users tag the
same object (an image in this case) and an ontology is extended based on these tags while being
tolerant of different points of view. Both the tagging and the ontological models are intentionally
designed to suit the multi-perspective environment. The paper develops a method based on a set of
rules that determine how to associate new concepts to predefined perspectives (in addition to
determining relations to topics or other concepts as typically done in previous research) and how to
insert and maintain multiple perspectives.
Findings – This case study experiment, with a set of selected annotated images, indicates the
soundness of the proposed ontological model.
Originality/value – The proposed framework characterises the underlying processes for controlled
collaborative development of a multi-perspective ontology and its application to improve image
annotation, searching and browsing. The significance of this research is that it focuses on exploring
the impact of creating a constantly evolving ontology based on collaborative tagging. The paper is not
aware of any other work that has attempted to devise such an environment and to study its dynamics.
Keywords Dynamics, Digitallibraries
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Tags provide a simple and direct mechanism to create annotations that reflect a variety
of facets and also provide a direct means for embarking on a search (Schmitz, 2006).
However, purely tag-based search tends to have low recall performance due to varying
vocabulary used by different users. For example, in Flickr some photos of the Western
Wall in Jerusalem are annotated as “western wall”, others as “wailing wall”, “kotel” or
“westernwall”. Tag variability is also caused by tagging that refers to some personal
information and associations of the annotators. Thus a picture of fireworks is tagged as
“bride” since they took place during someone’s wedding. Obviously, for the searching
user such results areirrelevant. Moreover when an initialsearch returns a large number
of results, tags do not support efficient or intuitive query refinement models. Recent
attempts to reduce the tag variability and incompleteness problem (Sigurbjo
¨rnsson and
van Zwol, 2008; Xu et al., 2006), suggested tag recommendation systems that help add
more relevant tags and thus increase the recall of image retrieval.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 307/07).
Multi-perspective
ontology
acquisition
145
Refereed article received
18 February 2009
Approved for publication
19 August 2009
Online Information Review
Vol. 34 No. 1, 2010
pp. 145-159
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684521011024173
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