Semantic Interoperation of Information Systems by Evolving Ontologies through Formalized Social Processes

For autonomously developed information systems to interoperate in a meaningful manner, ontologies capturing the intended semantics of that interoperation have to be developed by a community of stakeholders in those information systems. As the requirements of the ontology and the ontology itself evolve, so in general will the community, and vice versa. Ontology construction should thus be viewed as a complex activity leading to formalized semantic agreement involving various social processes within the community, and that may translate into a number of ontology evolution operators to be implemented. The hybrid ontologies that emerge in this way indeed need to support both the social agreement processes in the stakeholder communities and the eventual reasoning implemented in the information systems that are governed by these ontologies. In this paper, we discuss formal aspects of the social processes involved, a so-called fact-oriented methodology and formalism to structure and describe these, as well as certain relevant aspects of the communities in which they occur. We also report on a prototypical tool set that supports such a methodology, and on examples of some early experiments.