Designing a Multi-Layered Ontology for the Science and Technology Innovation Concept Knowledge-Base

In order to help innovation researchers to study the complex and dynamic Innovation Eco-system to answer important questions such as "why some science and technology (S&T) innovations become highly popular, while many others do not?", we designed a knowledge-base, i.e., ontology, to capture innovations, key actors - individuals and organizations that play key roles in innovations' evolvement, and the dynamic interactions among innovations and the key actors. Our design structures the ontology into multiple layers with the innovations on the basic layer, key players on the extended layer, and supporting documents on the evidence layer. The temporal properties added into the ontology enable the representation and analysis of the innovation evolvement. We validated our design by examining how the knowledge-base could empower innovation research. The main contributions are the conceptual framework of the ontology that captures the Innovation Eco-system over time, and the methods used to build and validate the ontology.