Exploiting Natural Language Definitions and (Legacy) Data for Facilitating Agreement Processes

In IT, ontologies to enable semantic interoperability is only of the branches in which agreement between a heterogeneous group of stakeholders are of vital importance. As agreements are the result of interactions, appropriate methods should take into account the natural language used by the community. In this paper, we extend a method for reaching a consensus on a conceptualization within a community of stakeholders, exploiting the natural language communication between the stakeholders. We describe how agreements on informal and formal descriptions are complementary and interplay. To this end, we introduce, describe and motivate the nature of some of the agreements and the two distinct levels of commitment. We furthermore show how these commitments can be exploited to steer the agreement processes. Concepts introduced in this paper have been implemented in a tool for collaborative ontology engineering, called GOSPL, which can be also adopted for other purposes, e.g., the construction a lexicon for larger software projects.