User Evaluation Study of a Tagging Approach to Semantic Mapping

A key aspect of semantic interoperability is the semantic mapping process itself. Traditionally, semantic mapping processes conducted by knowledge engineers have been proposed to bridge this gap. However, knowledge engineers alone are unlikely to cope with the ever increasing amount of mapping work required, especially as mappings themselves begin to be specialised for different contexts. One solution is to develop new mapping processes that enable users to participate in the mapping process themselves. In this paper we present an evaluation study of our user-driven tagging approach to the semantic mapping process. In our approach, users actively participate in generating mappings by categorising automatically generated candidate matches presented in natural language over a long time period. In the evaluation study three groups of users generated mappings between their personal ontologies and a sports ontology describing sports news content from RSS feeds. The mapping process was embedded within the users' work environment as a Firefox browser extension. The study is discussed, focusing on whether the mapping process is unintrusive, engaging and simplified for the user. The evaluation results were promising and indicate that people with various levels of expertise could become active in the semantic mapping process.