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Tech Report kmi-98-12 Abstract


Tadzebao and WebOnto: Discussing, browsing, and editing ontologies on the web
Techreport ID: kmi-98-12
Date: 1998
Author(s): John Domingue
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In this paper I describe two systems which, in different ways, address the shortcomings of current approaches to enabling ontology construction and use via the World-Wide Web. The first system Tadzebao, enables knowledge engineers to hold synchronous and asynchronous discussions about ontologies. Tadzebao addresses the fact that an integral part of communal design, dialogue, has largely been ignored by the community. The second system WebOnto uses a Java based client to alleviate the acknowledged problems of creating interfaces in `vanilla HTML'.
 
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Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.