D2.1: Inventory of Topics and Clusters

Title: SPECIFYING A CONCEPTUALIZATION (THE ONTOLOGY CONCEPT)

Specifying a conceptualization (the Ontology concept)

 “Ontology” (with a big “O”) represents the “discipline” is concerned with the study of how to specify conceptualizations. The term “ontology” (with a small ‘o’) is used to refer to the concrete specifications of a conceptualisation of a given domain (Gruber, 1993).

In this section, we are going to present the theoretical perspective of this conceptualization, via a description of the concept of Ontology, what ontologies are used for and how to design them. We will also mention some of the technologies (WIKI and semantic web tools) that can be used for the collaborative construction of this conceptualisation. We will conclude by looking at the organisational issues such as roles assignments and motivational aspects. 

Note 1: In the rest of this document, we use indistinctly the term “ontology” or the expression “specification of a conceptualization” to refer to the same concept. We have decided to keep using the expression “specification of a conceptualization” in some places just to keep this document more accessible to the non-specialist (the term “ontology” being sometime perceived as too complex for a “normal” audience). 

Note 2: The Ontology concept that is described in this chapter is intended for the specialist or for the non-specialist that would like to be aware of the theories of conceptualisation underlying this work. The less expert readers (or the expert who is only interested to get a quick overview) are invited to skip this first part and directly go the second part (2.2) which describes how these principles are being applied for