Ontological analysis of document usage: an exploratory study

A central issue in supporting the use of document contents by knowledge workers and decision-makers is understanding how those document users think about and refer to the contents of documents. An approach to developing this understanding in specific document usage situations, called ontological analysis, is presented. The illustrative document usage task that is studied is an instance of the activity of preparing a response to a request for proposal. A semantic grammar, and static and dynamic domain equations for some facets of this task, are developed. It is concluded that ontological analysis holds promise as an approach to designing document user support.<>