Using a reputation framework to identify community leaders in ontology engineering (short paper)

Abstract

Ontology-engineering methods often prescribe roles and responsibilities. A problem is to identify who will play what role in an ontology-engineering project. We present a generic reputation framework for identifying leaders in a community of stakeholders. Reputation scores are based on analyzing the interactions users have with each other and a collaborative ontology-engineering platform. The framework was applied in an experiment involving 36 users that lasted for 8 weeks. We compared the results with the leaders identified by the participants via a survey and noticed an important overlap. Our results thus show the feasibility of identifying leaders in an ontology-engineering project based on reputation, which can then be assigned additional responsibilities. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.