A negotiation approach to support conceptual agreements for ontology content

Abstract

Conceptualisation processes are pervasive to most technical and professional activities, but are seldom addressed explicitly due to the lack of theoretical and practical methods and tools. However, it seems not to be a popular research topic in knowledge representation or its sub-areas such as ontology engineering. The approach described in this paper is a contribution to the development of methods and tools to collaborative conceptualisation processes. The particularly challenging problem of conceptual negotiation is here tackled through a combination of ColBlend method and an argumentation-based strategy, creating an innovative method to conceptual negotiation, argile method. This method was implemented in to the ConceptME platform as an advanced negotiation mechanism. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.