Abstract
Ontologies have gained popularity in a wide range of research fields, in the domains where possible interpretations of terms have to be narrowed and there is a need for explicit inter-relations of concepts. Although reusability has always been claimed as one of the main characteristics of ontologies, it has been shown that reusing domain ontologies is not a common practice. Perhaps this is due to the fact that despite a large number of works towards complexity management of ontologies, popular systems do not incorporate enough functionality for ontology explanation. We analyse the state of the art and substantiate a minimal functionality that the system should provide in order to make domain ontologies better understandable for their users.
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Notes
- 1.
An epistemic interest is a reason scientists have for asking explanation-seeking questions.
- 2.
We come back to the discussion about forms of explanation later.
- 3.
Henceforward, by ‘user’ we mean a domain expert or a developer or simply anyone interested in getting an ontology explanation from the computer system.
- 4.
- 5.
For examples of complexity management techniques based on foundational ontologies one could refer to [10].
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Romanenko, E., Calvanese, D., Guizzardi, G. (2022). Towards Pragmatic Explanations for Domain Ontologies. In: Corcho, O., Hollink, L., Kutz, O., Troquard, N., Ekaputra, F.J. (eds) Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. EKAW 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13514. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17105-5_15
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