Toward multiviewpoint ontology construction by collaboration of non-experts and crowdsourcing: The case of the effect of diet on health

Domain experts are skilled in buliding a narrow ontology that reflects their subfield of expertise based on their work experience and personal beliefs. We call this type of ontology a single-viewpoint ontology. There can be a variety of such single viewpoint ontologies that represent a wide spectrum of subfields and expert opinions on the domain. However, to have a complete formal vocabulary for the domain they need to be linked and unified into a multiviewpoint model while having the subjective viewpoint statements marked and distinguished from the objectively true statements. In this study, we propose and implement a two-phase methodology for multiviewpoint ontology construction by nonexpert users. The proposed methodology was implemented for the domain of the effect of diet on health. A large-scale crowdsourcing experiment was conducted with about 750 ontological statements to determine whether each of these statements is objectively true, viewpoint, or erroneous. Typically, in crowdsourcing experiments the workers are asked for their personal opinions on the given subject. However, in our case their ability to objectively assess others' opinions was examined as well. Our results show substantially higher accuracy in classification for the objective assessment approach compared to the results based on personal opinions.