Section: New Results

Co-Construction of Community Ontologies

Participants : Papa Fary Diallo, Isabelle Mirbel, Olivier Corby.

PhD Thesis on Co-Construction of Community Ontologies and Corpus in a Limited Technological Environment.

To refresh the memory of people and revive many stories that accompany the creation and daily life of different Africa territories, the establishment of an online sociocultural encyclopedia was conceived. It will be an online platform based on a Geographical Information System (GIS) enriched by a semantic layer allowing access to different information.

In the last decade, we have seen the rise of two visions of the Web: on one side the Social Web or Web 2.0, which places users at the heart of the Web, they are no longer spectator but become editor of the content of Web pages. On another hand, the Semantic Web proposes knowledge representations (ontologies) that allow machines (software agent) to better understand data on the Web. Both aims were often opposed, but there are a lot of work trying to combine these visions.

In our work, oriented in this direction, we will try to create a new point of view of Community concept within the Web. Community is a group of people who share a common set of values and interests. This shift of view allows us to address a specific community as an atomic entity and focus this time on the sharing of knowledge between communities. The second challenge is to combine Social Web and Semantic Web technologies. Using Semantic Web in our social network, we have a semantic layer that provides access to various information contained in the network. Furthermore, the Semantic Web opens up a semantic approach to social network analysis, which also allows extracting new knowledge.

In this thesis, we study the implementation of an online platform to build and share the collective memory of citizens and revive many stories by using a semantic layer. Semantic Social Network Analysis will allow us to present data in eye-catching way and in another view. This platform will be updated by the actors and the citizens of these territories, and share their history and heritage through their "social network".