Collaborative support for community data sharing

The Semantic Web aims to create a web of data where contents can be easily discovered and integrated using metadata. Many ontologies have been proposed over the years in different domains, thus producing a semantic heterogeneity that is difficult to manage. Various automated ontology mapping techniques and tools have been developed to facilitate the bridging and integration of distributed data repositories. Nevertheless, such tools are still in need of human supervision to ensure accuracy. The spread of Web 2.0 approaches demonstrate the possibility and the added value of using collaborative techniques for improving data sharing and consensus reaching. In this paper, we describe our prototype for collaborative ontology mapping and data sharing. The possibility to exploit ontology alignments for querying data is a key capability for data sharing in a networked ontology environment