A Consensus-Building Support System based on Ontology Exploration

Consensus-building among various stakeholders from different fields is an important issue in order to facilitate policy and decision-making. For consensus-building stakeholders have to know what others are thinking about each other because differences of their viewpoints cause some conflicts. In this paper we propose a consensus-building support system based on ontology exploration. The key ideas consists two steps 1) developing an ontology to provide a base knowledge to be shared among the users (stakeholders), 2) each user explore the ontology according to his/her viewpoint and generate conceptual maps as the result of the exploration, and 3) they know differences of viewpoints through comparison of generated maps. This paper shows an overview of this tool, and discusses its usability and effectiveness through evaluation experiments by domain experts.