Socio-semantic Congruence in collaborative ontology development projects

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Claudia Müller-Birn; Professor Dr. Markus Strohmaier
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: from 2014 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 250967807

The goal of the planned research project is to obtain, prepare, model, and analyze existing social and semantic structures in collaborative ontology development projects, such as Wikidata and Collaborative Protogé, in order to identify existing interdependencies between the organizational structures of the development project and the collectively created artifact. This goal is based on our underlying research question: Do social structures of collaborative ontology development projects influence existing semantic structures and vice versa? This research question led us to six main working areas that shall be addressed in this research project. The starting point is the modeling of social and semantic structures in ontology development projects. Based on that the researcher team determines the socio-semantic congruence over time and expects to identify specific patterns in the development trajectory of the considered projects. The insights shall be used to check possibly existing causalities between changes in the social and the semantic structures. Our insights shall be used twofold: first, for recommending extensions or improvements to existing methods, software tools, and evaluation approaches, and second, for evaluating them in real ontology development projects, such Wikidata and Collaborative Protogé.Our research approach allows us to deepen our understanding of possible influences of social processes on the collaborative creation of ontologies (and vice versa). It builds therefore the foundation for developing novel methods and software tools for measuring and guiding development processes in ontology projects. Such a deep understanding of existing processes and dependencies will enable us to support project participants more systematically in their development efforts. Furthermore, it might even be possible to ensure that the collectively created ontology corresponds to specific quality criteria.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants