Pragmatic-based Ontology Design and Alignment

A multitude of research works and surveys dealing with ontology reuse point to a discrepancy between ontology engineers and users when interpreting the meaning of ontology concepts. Missing the engineers’ knowledge of the concepts’ usage in certain contexts may lead to problems (e.g., pragmatic heterogeneity) in the interpretation task caused by the lack of the users’ capability to comprehend design decisions (i.e., what they have in mind when describing a domain of interest). The intended use of concepts has a great impact on their interpretation. Therefore, we assume that meaning interpretation involves more than merely identifying the semantics of assumptions explicitly expressed by model theory-based techniques, since meaning depends on both semantics and pragmatics. For this purpose, we introduce a pragmatic-based approach for implementing an evidence-based (unidirectional) communication model from engineers to users, which is mainly influenced by the relevance-based inferential model of verbal communication.