Open Ontologies and Open Knowledge Bases for Modeling the Social Layer of the Semantic Web

We propose Open Ontologies and Open Knowledge Bases as means for the acquisition, evolution and representation of socially (but not necessarily cooperatively) generated semantically heterogeneous knowledge for open environments like the Semantic Web. In contrast to traditional approaches to knowledge assembling, knowledge sharing and ontology integration, which emphasize semantical consistency and the consensus finding among the participants, Open Ontologies and Open Knowledge Bases derive knowledge from possibly inconsistent, indefinite or conflictive communication processes. They explicitly model semantical heterogeneity arising from source conflicts in multiple levels of complexity reduction, and allow the probabilistic weighting of inconsistent knowledge. 1 The Need for Modeling Social Knowledge