Fostering knowledge evolution through community-based participation

The ontology development process is typically led by single or small groups of experts, with users mostly playing a passive role. Such an elitist approach in building ontologies hinders the primary purpose of large-scale knowledge sharing. Collaborative tagging systems have emerged as a new web annotation method proving appealing features in fostering users to collaboratively organize information through their own metadata. Collaborative tagging shifts the creation of metadata for indexing web resources, from an individual professional activity to a collective endeavor, where every user is a potential contributor. In this paper we introduce an approach to knowledge evolution which aims to exploit the ability of collaborative tagging in fostering community members participation to move forward an initial knowledge structure. We present user scenarios about how subscribers of a scientific digital library might play the role of knowledge organizers through personal organization and sharing of citations of interest.