The Emergent semantic web: a consensus approach for deriving semantic knowledge on the web
Clifford A. Behrens, Vipul Kashyap · International Semantic Web Conference · 2001
The recent and growing interest in the Semantic Web has given rise to a flurry of activity in standardization bodies (such as the W3C) to specify semantics using formal languages and inference mechanisms. The real challenge, however, is to link formal semantics with deeper meaning as reflected by consensus discovered among users on the Semantic Web. We believe the process of deriving and formally describing ontologies for the Web (expressed using standardized languages) is necessarily a social-cultural one; hence, new consensus-based tools are required to derive shared semantic systems for different communities of interest. This paper introduces Consensus Analysis as a means for deriving semantic knowledge from the information provided by subject matter experts and describes the Schemer System prototype for acquiring and processing this information. The results of a trial application of this approach and prototype on technologists asked to identify current mass market consumer trends in the domain of Internet privacy and security are reported. These findings implicate Consensus Analysis as a powerful tool capable of enabling the semantic Web by yielding core knowledge such as controlled vocabularies and domain ontologies.