Crowd-sourcing ontology content and curation: the massive ontology interface

Crowd-sourcing is an increasingly popular approach to building large, complex public-interest projects. The ontology infrastructure that is required to scaffold the goals of the Semantic Web is such a project. We have been thinking hard about what ‘crowd-sourced ontology’ might look like, and are currently advancing on two fronts: user-supplied content and user-supplied curation. We achieve the former by mining 90% of the concepts and relations in our ontology from Wikipedia. However other research groups are also pursuing this strategy (e.g. DBpedia, YAGO). Our claim to be on the cutting edge is in our latter goal. We are building a web portal: The Massive Ontology Interface, for users to interact with our ontology in a clean, syntax-light format. The interface is designed to enable users to identify errors and add new concepts and assertions, and to discuss the knowledge in the open-ended way that fosters real collaboration in Wikipedia. We here present our system, discuss the design decisions that have shaped it and the motivation we offer users to interact with it.