An Ontological Model for Supporting Intention-Based Information Sharing on Collaborative Problem Solving

Web-based collaborative systems are potentially a rich source of knowledge for lifelong learning and professional development. In these systems, practitioners can share messages about their problems on daily work activities. These messages can also be used for analytical purposes, e.g., for understanding the development of a discussion as well as for evaluating how a system supports different types of conversations. These possibilities depend on a proper classification and adequate recovery of the messages regarding semantic and pragmatic aspects. The construction of a knowledge representation model that considers the pragmatic aspects of the messages is still an open research challenge. Such a model might support an intention-based retrieval of messages. In this investigation we argue that a model of this nature must include the association of semantics with illocutionary aspects of the users’ communication. This paper proposes an ontology using Semantic Web standards to associate messages to illocutions and ontology terms, as an integrated representation. The proposed model is grounded in the Pragmatic Web perspective including Semiotics and Speech Act Theory. Furthermore, we conduct a case study with scenarios of two different systems, where special education specialists share problems of their daily work activities.