Grounding knowledge acquisition with ontology explanation:A case study

Towards Pragmatic Explanations for Domain Ontologies

“…is the real work of science". Garcia and Vivacqua [8] concluded that "ontology explanation can be a valuable tool for semantic validation", where the latter term is defined as "human understanding of and agreement with the ontological representation".…”

“…However, does this imply that an ontology itself is such a clear, self-explained, and understandable artefact? Unfortunately, recent reports have shown, that despite existing well-accepted methods, "building an ontology is sometimes equated to an art" [8], and, even when ratified by experts, it may lead to unexpected results in trials. This brings us to the idea that an ontology as an artefact also needs to be explained.…”

“…Garcia and Vivacqua [8] claimed that "the explanation played a fundamental role in the identification of problems" with the ontology. The main goal was to make the evaluation process more productive, and to help ontology users and developers to understand and audit the ontology.…”

“…The authors reported about visual inspection as well as text explanations generated in a story-like format. They also noticed that using domain cases, i.e., examples, during the ontology development is a good way to elicit conflicts between experts' opinions [8].…”

“…Nevertheless, despite all the efforts suggested in [8] towards ontology explanation, the first version of the developed artefact exhibited some critical problems. Taking into account how knowledge acquisition sessions were organised, we suppose that the explanation-as-a-process (both as a cognitive process as well as a social process) was properly supported.…”