Publikation
Knowledge Mediation: A Procedure for the Cooperative Construction of Domain Ontologies
Felix-Robinson Aschoff; Franz Schmalhofer; Ludger van Elst
In: Andreas Abecker; Ludger van Elst; Virginia Dignum (Hrsg.). Proceedings of the ECAI-2004 Workshop on Agent-mediated Knowledge Management (AMKM-2004). AAMAS Workshop on Agent-mediated Knowledge Management (AMKM-2004), August 22, Valencia, Spain, Pages 29-38, 2004.
Zusammenfassung
In order to enable knowledge sharing and reuse
among software entities, artificial intelligence researchers have
proposed to develop ‘ontologies’ as the explicit formal
specifications of conceptualizations. These ontologies were
normally designed by knowledge engineers who laid down the
basic categories and relations for a certain domain. However, in
any practical setting there will be conflicting interests which
pertain to different conceptualizations of which a knowledge
engineer will usually not be aware of. For this reason, we
propose a three-phased ontology construction procedure in
which the knowledge engineer mediates between the differing
conceptions experts or users may hold about a knowledge
domain. This procedure is described in detail in this paper and
subsequently empirically demonstrated and evaluated in a study
with 28 participants. The evaluation reveals convincing
advantages of the proposed knowledge mediation procedure. We
conclude that an ontology construction process is not only an
engineering task but more importantly also a social process
where the relevant parties for example of a work place need to
be involved before successful and durable solutions can be
found.