Aspects Socioculturels et Temporels dans les Ontologies pour les Communautés Virtuelles. (Sociocultural and Temporal Aspects in Ontologies for Virtual Communities)

This thesis is set in a research e ort that aims to model sociocultural and temporal aspects to allow Senegalese communities to share and to co-construct their sociocultural knowledge. Indeed, with the globalization it is very common to meet African youth and particularly Senegalese youth knowing more about the geography of the West than their own countries. Thus, to refresh the memory of our fellow citizens and revive the many stories that accompany the creation and daily life of the di erent Senegalese territories, we initiated the establishment of an online application that allows Senegalese communities to share and co-construct their cultural heritage. Our proposals are based on social and semantic web technologies. indeed, social web proposes a framework where value is created by the aggregation of many individual user contributions. Thereby, social web makes easier corpus co-construction. The semantic web enables to nd, to combine and to share resources, not only between humans but also between machines. The combination of these two technologies enables Senegalese communities to share and co-construct their cultural heritage in a collaborative and semantic environment . Our contributions include to (i) propose ontologies to annotate sociocultural resources and (ii) provide a framework for communities to share and co-construct their knowledge. Ontologies are backbone of the semantic web and allow to characterize a domain by describing the basic concepts and the relations between them. Thus, we have de ned two ontologies : 1) a sociocultural ontology based on cultural-historical activity theory and 2) a temporal ontology to annotate temporally sociocultural resources. We also proposed a virtual community called cultural knowledge-building community which is an adaptation of the knowledge-building community in the cultural eld. In this dissertation, we present (1) a state of the art, one hand, on the capitalization of knowledge that covers both the cultural-historical activity theory and typologies of virtual communities and, other hand, the temporal annotation of semantic Web resources, (2) a methodology to build a sociocultural ontology and characteristics of the cultural knowledge-building communities, (3) an ontology to annotate temporally semantic web resources particularly human time expressions and (4) the implementation of a system that integrates the scienti c contributions of this work and that allows Senegalese communities to share and co-construct their cultural heritage.