An evolutionary ontology approach for community-based competency management

Abstract

In this article we describe an evolutionary ontology approach that distinguishes between major ontology changes and minor ontology changes. We divide the community in three (possibly overlapping) groups, i.e. facilitators, contributors, and users. Facilitators are a selected group of domain experts who represent the intended community. These facilitators define the intended goals of the ontology and will be responsible for major ontology and ontology platform changes. A larger group of contributors consists of all participating domain experts. The contributors will carry out minor ontology changes, like instantiation of concepts and description of concept instances. Users of the ontology may explore the ontology content via the ontology platform and/or make use of the published ontology content in XML or HTML format. The approach makes use of goal and group specific user interfaces to guide the ontology evolution process. For the minor ontology changes, the approach relies on the wisdom of crowds. © Springer-Verlag 2009.