Deriving a Lightweight Corporate Ontology form a Folksonomy: a Methodology and its Possible Applications

Abstract

Companies use company-specific terminology that may differ from the terminology used in existing corporate ontologies (e.g. Tove) and therefore need their own ontology. However, the current ontology engineering techniques are time-consuming and there exists a conceptual mismatch among developers and users. In contrast, folksonomies or the flat bottom-up taxonomies constituted by web users' tags are rapidly created. In this paper, (1) we present an approach that cost-efficiently derives a lightweight corporate ontology from a corporate folksonomy, (2) by means of a folksonomy dataset from a European company, we provide preliminary evidence that our suggested approach reflects the company-specific terminology, (3) we detect a number of possible applications for the company when implementing the presented methodology on a corporate folksonomy and (4) as an additional evaluation, we asked the company to briefly evaluate the results and possible applications.