On cooperatively creating dynamic ontologies

Collaborative construction of ontologies is still hampered by immature methodologies and by tools which are insufficient for domain experts who are not at the same time, knowledge engineers. The DynamOnt project has set out to develop a methodology for collaboratively creating group ontologies which evolve over time as well as in space and internal complexity. The project also seeks to identify requirements and specifications for tools which will support the construction of such dynamically evolving ontologies. Major issues are the guidance of knowledge workers towards soundly constructed ontologies with the help of upper level ontologies and an exploration into language issues - in our case the scenario for constructing ontologies, if German is the language of choice for the domain experts. We also investigate the relationship between terminology and ontology, which we view as a bridge between linguistically motivated and IT motivated standardisation of conceptual models. We envisage knowledge workers' environments of the future to be tightly integrated systems with their hypertextual capabilities being controlled by ontologically sound interaction and navigation models.