Survey of Tools for Collaborative Knowledge Construction and Sharing

The fast growth and spread of Web 2.0 environments have demonstrated the great willingness of general Web users to contribute and share various type of content and information. Many very successful web sites currently exist which thrive on the wisdom of the crowd, where web users in general are the sole data providers and curators. The Semantic Web calls for knowledge to be semantically represented using ontologies to allow for better access and sharing of data. However, constructing ontologies collaboratively is not well supported by most existing ontology and knowledge-base editing tools. This has resulted in the recent emergence of a new range of collaborative ontology construction tools with the aim of integrating some Web 2.0 features into the process of structured knowledge construction. This paper provides a survey of the start of the art of these tools, and highlights their significant features and capabilities.