Fast, cheap and out of control: a zero curation model for ontology development

During two days at a conference focused on circulatory and respiratory health, 68 volunteers untrained in knowledge engineering participated in an experimental knowledge capture exercise. These volunteers created a shared vocabulary of 661 terms, linking these terms to each other and to a pre-existing upper ontology by adding 245 hyponym relationships and 340 synonym relationships. While ontology-building has proved to be an expensive and labor-intensive process using most existing methodologies, the rudimentary ontology constructed in this study was composed in only two days at a cost of only 3 t-shirts, 4 coffee mugs, and one chocolate moose. The protocol used to create and evaluate this ontology involved a targeted, web-based interface. The design and implementation of this protocol is discussed along with quantitative and qualitative assessments of the constructed ontology.