Evolving and Validating Annotations in Web-based Collaborative Environments through Ontology Matching∗

The research presented in this paper describes an automated approach for extracting concepts from annotated shared con-tents within a collaborative web environment, and matching them with domain ontologies. Feedback on the domain on-tology suitability for the environment purposes is provided as a result of the automatic matching between the domain ontology and the free tags that users of the system employ. This approach will enable annotations and domain ontolo-gies to evolve coherently with the real use of any social web environment. Experiments carried out on the Knowledge Practice Environment of the EU-funded project KP-Lab demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.4 [Knowledge Representation Formalisms andMeth