Towards Modeling the Social Layer of Emergent Knowledge Using Open Ontologies
Tina Froehner, Matthias Nickles, Gerhard Weiß · 2004
In the context of open environments like Open Multiagent and Peer2Peer Systems, the Semantic Web and Communities of Practice, knowledge-based applications with self-interested, autonomous knowledge sources like information agents and humans have gained increased interest in recent times. For such environments, neither the consistency nor the reliability or the definiteness of the input knowledge can be ensured. Whereas there already exist promising approaches to the filtering, mapping and homogenization of inconsistent and dynamic knowledge, the modeling of knowledge heterogeneity and dynamics itself has been largely neglected so far. In this work, we propose Open Ontologies as a “social” approach to this issue. Open Ontologies are based on a distinct communication-oriented paradigm as they emerge from and evolve with communication processes, and allow for the modeling and processing of semantically heterogeneous, possibly conflicting conceptual knowledge by means of its reification according to its social (i.e. communicational) meaning, impact and relevance, and the probabilistic weighting of inconsistent knowledge facets.