An Argumentation Ontology for DIstributed, Loosely-controlled and evolvInG Engineering processes of oNTologies (DILIGENT)

A prerequisite to the success of the Semantic Web are shared ontologies which enable the seamless exchange of information between different parties. Engineering a shared ontology is a social process. Since its participants have slightly different views on the world, a harmonization effort requires discussing the resulting ontology. During the discussion, participants exchange arguments which may support or object to certain ontology engineering decisions. Experience from software engineering shows that tracking exchanged arguments can help users at a later stage to better understand the assumptions underlying the design decisions. Furthermore, as the constructed ontology becomes larger, ontology engineers might argue in a contradictory way without knowing so. In this paper we present an ontology which formalizes the main concepts which are used in an DILIGENT ontology engineering discussion and thus enables tracking arguments and allows for inconsistency detection. We provide an example which is drawn from experiments in an ontology engineering process to construct an ontology for knowledge management in our institute. Having constructed the ontology we also show how automated ontology learning algorithms could be taken as participants in the OE discussion. Hence, we enable the integration of manual, semi-automatic and automatic ontology creation approaches.