On the social dynamics of ontological commitments

Abstract

The aim of my thesis is to provide a solution in which any stakeholder of a particular community (with a specific goal) can contribute to the ontology construction process, making the contribution of the "unproductive" long tail of the community relevant. Members in a community will describe their view and maintain a dialogue in natural language. I believe that granting the community first-class-citizenship within ontological commitments by (i) mapping those natural language descriptions and dialogues to formal descriptions and decisions within the ontology engineering process and (ii) exploiting the existing application commitments to that ontology improves the quality of ontological commitments by truly representing the community and their latest requirements. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.