Grounding Ontologies with Social Processes and Natural Language

Ontologies for enabling semantic interoperability is one of the branches in which agreement between a heterogeneous group of stakeholders is of vital importance. As agreements are the result of interactions, appropriate methods should take into account the natural language used by the community during those interactions. In this article, we first extend a fact-oriented formalism for the construction of so-called hybrid ontologies. In hybrid ontologies, concepts are described both formally and informally and the agreements are being grounded in community interactions. We furthermore present GOSPL, a collaborative ontology engineering method on top of this extension and describe how agreements on formal and informal descriptions are complementary and interplay. We show how the informal descriptions can drive the ontology construction process and how commitments from the ontology to the application are exploited to steer the agreement processes. All of the ideas presented in this article have been implemented in a tool and used in an experiment involving 40+ users, of which a discussion is presented.