A generic framework for Collaborative multi-perspective ontology acquisition

The research objective of this work is to develop a general framework that incorporates collaborative social tagging with a novel ontology scheme conveying multiple perspectives. We propose a framework where multiple users tag the same object (an image in our case), and an ontology is extended based on these tags while being tolerant about different points of view. We are not aware of any other work that attempted to devise such an environment and to study its dynamics. The proposed framework characterizes the underlying processes for controlled collaborative development of a multi-perspective ontology and its application to improve image annotation, searching and browsing. Our case study experiment with a set of selected annotated images indicates the soundness of the proposed ontological model.