Crowd-based Ontology Engineering with the uComp Protege Plugin

Crowdsourcing techniques have been shown to provide effective means for solving a variety of ontology engineering problems. Yet, they are mainly being used as external means to ontology engineering, without being closely integrated into the work of ontology engineers. In this paper we investigate how to closely integrate crowdsourcing into ontology engineering practices. Firstly, we show that a set of basic crowdsourcing tasks are used recurrently to solve a range of ontology engineering problems. Secondly, we present the uComp Protege plugin that facilitates the integration of such typical crowdsourcing tasks into ontology engineering work from within the Protege ontology editing environment. An evaluation of the plugin in a typical ontology engineering scenario where ontologies are built from automatically learned semantic structures, shows that its use reduces the working times for the ontology engineers 11 times, lowers the overall task costs with 40% to 83% depend- ing on the crowdsourcing settings used and leads to data quality com- parable with that of tasks performed by ontology engineers. Evaluations on a large ontology from the anatomy domain confirm that crowdsourcing is a scalable and effective method: good quality results (accuracy of 89% and 99%) are obtained while achieving cost reductions with 75% from the ontology engineer costs and providing comparable overall task duration.