Ontology Personalization: An Approach Based on Conceptual Prototypicality

With the current emergence of Cognitive Sciences and the development of Knowledge Management applications in Social and Human Sciences, Subjective Knowledge becomes an unavoidable subject and a real challenge, which must be integrated and developed in Ontology Engineering and Ontology-based Information Retrieval. This paper introduces a new approach dedicated to the Personalization of a Domain Ontology. Inspired by works in Cognitive Psychology, our work is based on a process which aims at capturing the user-sensitive degree of truth of the categorisation process, that is the one which is really perceived by the end-user. Practically, this process consists in decorating the Specialisation/Generalisation links (i.e. the ISA links) of the hierarchy of concepts with a specific gradient. As this gradient is defined according to the three aspects of the semiotic triangle (i.e. intensional, extensional and expressional dimension), we call it Semiotic-based Prototypicality Gradient. It enrichs the initial formal semantics of an ontology by adding a pragmatics defined according to a context of use which depends on parameters like culture, educational background and/or emotional context of the end-user.