Ontology for Representing Human Needs

Abstract

Need satisfaction plays a fundamental role in human wellbeing. Hence understanding citizens' needs is crucial for developing a successful social and economic policy. This notwithstanding, the concept of need has not yet found its place in information systems and online tools. Furthermore, assessing needs itself remains a labor-intensive, mostly offline activity, where only a limited support by computational tools is available. In this paper, we make the first step towards employing need management in the design of information systems supporting participation and participatory innovation by proposing OpeNeeD, a family of ontologies for representing human needs data. As a proof of concept, OpeNeeD has been used to represent, enrich and query the results of a needs assessment study in a local citizen community in one of the Vienna districts. The proposed ontology will facilitate such studies and enable the representation of citizens' needs as Linked Data, fostering its co-creation and incentivizing the use of Open Data and services based on it.

Augmented Reality for Human Needs: An Ontology

“…The study of human needs has roots in psychology, economics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and social sciences, which indicates the importance of needs, and their satisfaction in human life. Despite that fact, there is still a shortage of incorporating human needs in information systems and tools [14]. Augmented reality is a growing field that may benefit from the utilization of human needs.…”

“…Based on the above reasoning, this paper looks into the development of an ontology that combines the concepts of augmented reality, human needs' satisfaction, and the detection of those needs from context and user information to support conceptual modeling. Previous studies on ontologies included a representation of needs as they are found in various theories of human needs [14], an ontology focusing only on Max-Neef's model of human needs [22], context modeling [23], and developing augmented reality based on ontological context awareness [16].…”

“…The researchers in [14] pinpointed the limited use of human needs concepts in information systems and the lack of needs assessment tools in computing. They developed an ontology called OPENEED and incorporated need theories and need assessment methods.…”

“…Concepts from the device model ontology, the environment model ontology, and the information visualization ontology are incorporated in the developed ontology. The Human Needs section is derived from the FHN [22], and OpeNeed Ontologies [14].…”

Supporting Pluralism by Artificial Intelligence: Conceptualizing Epistemic Disagreements as Digital Artifacts

“…To this end, POLYPHONY supports disagreement annotations of varying granularity: from the ontology level to the level of single triple, or a collection of triples. As a proof of concept, POLYPHONY was applied to OPENEED, a modular ontology for human needs data proposed by Human et al (2017), to represent disagreements between different modules of the OPENEED ontology, i.e. to annotate epistemic disagreements between needs theories.…”