Ontology Maturing With Lightweight Collaborative Ontology Editing Tools / quote 2 of 3
Ontology building as a maturing process
Based on the knowledge maturing process introduced in [Sch05], we have to view ontology building as a maturing process (see fig. 1). It starts with some emerging ideas of the individual without having a clear or even shared terminology, communicated only informally. These vague concept ideas are gradually disseminated into the community where the community discusses and consolidates them. The result of this can still be textual definitions without a formal semantics. The formalization is accomplished in a third phase in which a common conceptualization and terminology matures until a formal ontology is established. These maturing phases apply to individual parts (concepts, relations etc.) of the ontology so that the ontology as a whole is under continuous transformation and always characterized by different degrees of maturity. Therefore, we need support for (a) the transition of the individual emergent idea level to the community level and (b) the community level itself where we must not require too much formalization at the beginning and where the users can start with informal structures like tagging which they can formalize later on.