A Case Study in Supporting Distributed, Loosely-Controlled and Evolving Engineering iconologies

Abstract

Knowledge management solutions relying on central repositories sometimes have not met expectations, since users often create knowledge ad-hoc using their individual vocabulary and using their own decentral IT infrastructure (e.g., their laptops). To improve knowledge management for such decentralized and individualized knowledge work, it is necessary to, first, provide a corresponding IT infrastructure and, second, deal with the harmonization of different vocabularies/ontologies. In this chapter, we briefly sketch the technical peer-to-peer platform that we have built, but then we focus on the harmonization of the participating ontologies. Thereby, the objective of this harmonization is to avoid the worst incongruence by having users share a core ontology that they can expand for local use at their will and individual needs. The task that then needs to be solved is one of distributed, loosely-controlled, and evolving engineering of ontologies. In this chapter, we present a corresponding process template and a case study.