Ontologies for information management: balancing formality, stability, and sharing scope

Ontologies are an emerging paradigm to support declarativity, interoperability, and intelligent services in many areas, such as Agent-based Computation, Distributed Information Systems, and Expert Systems. Inspired by the definition of 'ontology', we discuss three dimensions of information that have fundamental impact on the usefulness of ontologies for information management: formality, stability, and sharing scope of information. We briefly sketch some techniques, which are suited to find a balance (in terms of cost-benefit ratio) in each of these dimensions when building and using ontology-based information systems. We characterize roles of ontology-related actors with respect to goals, knowledge, competencies, rights, and obligations. These roles allow to form ontology societies where specific mechanisms and processes can be installed to stabilize a steady state in the three dimensions discussed. The practical use of our approach is shown in the scenario of a distributed Organizational Memory architecture. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.