Collaborative ontology building using qualitative information collection methods

In the actual competitive context, doing business globally has become critical to the survival of most enterprises. To achieve it, enterprises require the establishment of cooperation agreements among each other. Thus, there is a demand for intelligent solutions capable of reinforcing partnerships and collaborations. However, due to the worldwide diversity of communities, a high number of knowledge representation elements, as ontologies, which are not semantically coincident, have appeared representing the same segment of reality. Therefore, even in the same domain, enterprises do not understand each other, impeding various systems parties to seamless communicate. To solve this semantic interoperability problem, it has been suggested to build a reference ontology able to represent such cluster of interoperating entities. The authors propose a collaborative ontology building methodology, enriched with qualitative information collection methods, to effectively improve the approach to elicit knowledge from business domain experts, towards interoperable intelligent systems.