A Pedagogical Approach for Collaborative Ontologies Building

Abstract

The collaborative ontology is a research domain linked to concepts of extended cognitive context and knowledge building in co-participation. The result of a survey about the main ontology engineering methodologies and ontology authoring tools, not only witnesses the fact that collaborative ontology authoring fortifies the process of ontology engineering, but also indicates that the collaborative ontology development and harmonization is not well supported by any of the existing ontology authoring tools or environments. These tools do not use a relevant pedagogical collaborative frame, as a collaborative writing approach for shaping the design features of cooperative building. Also the process of ontology building does not take into account what we can call “rich tagging”, that is the extraction of ontologies maturing through text produced and shared at a networking layer. In this proposition we present a cscl driven “ontology design model”. In this model, the ontology building process is maintained and validated by the encounter of 1) top-down level, where the collaborative writing scripts directs the development of authoring tools for the collaborative ontologies design and 2) bottom-up level, where the collective learning spaces such as forums and wikies, revisited by a semantic structure, are functional to the ontology extraction and validation in the learning experience.