Towards a Socio-technical Ontology Engineering Methodology

Abstract

The development of the semantic web technology has enabled the integration of existing systems and resources. The implementation can be seen such as in the Linked Open Data initiatives, semantic search and semantic web portal. Ontology has been playing the crucial role for the implementation of the semantic web technology, but the development of ontology itself has lagged behind. Methodologies have been developed for ontology engineering, but most of them focused on the technical rather than the socio-technical aspect. Only a few has approached socio-technically but only partially. This article will describe aspects towards a socio-technical approach in ontology engineering methodology more comprehensively. This approach is important because of the complexity and the social nature of the ontology building process. A comparative study will expose the plus and minus points of methods used within the existing methodologies from the socio-technical point of view. Then a workbench will be proposed that take socio-technical aspect within the ontology engineering methodology into account.