Ontology Engineering, Scientific Method and the Research Agenda

The call for a “focus on content” in ontology research by Nicola Guarino and Mark Musen in their launching statement of the journal Applied Ontology has quite some implications and ramifications. We reflectively discuss ontology engineering as a scientific discipline, and we put this into the wider perspective of debates in other fields, including the methodology of social and natural sciences, and of Information Systems and design science research. We outline how ontologies provide us with a (new) scientific method for theory formation. This positioning allows for stronger concepts and techniques for theoretical, empirical and practical validation that in our view are now needed in the field. A prerequisite for this is an emphasis on ontology as a (domain) content oriented concept, rather than as primarily a computer representation notion. Taking application domain theories and the associated content reference of ontologies really seriously as first-class citizens will actually increase the contribution of ontology engineering to the development of scientific method in general. Next, ontologies should develop from the current static representations of relatively stable domain content into actionable theories-in-use, and a possible way forward is to build in capabilities for self-organization of ontologies as service-oriented knowledge utilities (SOKUs) that can be delivered over the Web.