Aldo de Moor

The pragmatic web: a manifesto

he Web has been extremely successful in enabling information sharing among a seemingly unlimited number of people worldwide. The evergrowing amount of documents on the Web, however, results in information overload and often makes it difficult to discover the information that is relevant. The goal of the Semantic Web is to develop the basis for intelligent applications that enable more efficient information use by not just providing a set of linked documents but a collection of knowledge repositories T THE PRAGMATIC WEB: AMANIFESTO By Mareike Schoop, Aldo de Moor, and Jan L.G. Dietz

Conceptual Structures for Knowledge Creation and Communication

In Contextual Judgment Logic, Sowa’s conceptual graphs (understood as graphically structured judgments) are made mathematically explicit as concept graphs which represent information formally based on a power context family and rhetorically structured by relational graphs. The conceptual content of a concept graph is viewed as the information directly represented by the graph together with the information deducible from the direct information by object and concept implications coded in the power context family. The main result of this paper is that the conceptual contents can be derived as extents of the so-called conceptual information context of the corresponding power context family. In short, the conceptual contents of judgments are formally derivable as concept extents. 1 Information in Contextual Judgment Logic In this paper, information in the scope of Conceptual Knowledge Processing shall be understood in the same way as in Devlin’s book “Infosense Turning Information into Knowledge” [De99]. Devlin briefly summarizes his understanding of information and knowledge by the formulas: Information = Data + Meaning Knowledge = Internalized information + Ability to utilize the information Through Devlin’s understanding it becomes clear that Formal Concept Analysis [GW99] enables to support the representation and processing of information and knowledge as outlined in [Wi02a]. Since Contextual Logic [Wi00] with its semantics is based on Formal Concept Analysis, it is desirable to make also explicit why and how Contextual Logic may support the representation and processing of information and knowledge. In this paper, we concentrate on approaching this aim for Contextual Judgment Logic [DK03]. In Contextual Judgment Logic, judgments understood as asserting propositions are formally mathematized by so-called concept graphs which have been semantically introduced in [Wi97] as mathematizations of Sowa’s conceptual graphs [So84]. Since judgments are philosophically conceived as assertional combinations of concepts, their mathematizatzion is based on formal concepts of formal contexts (introduced in [Wi82]): The semantical base is given by a power A. de Moor, W. Lex, and B. Ganter (Eds.): ICCS 2003, LNAI 2746, pp. 1–15, 2003. c

From Habermas's communicative theory to practice on the internet

Abstract.  Communication plays a crucial role in influencing our social life. However, communication has often been distorted by unequal opportunities to initiate and participate in it. Such conditions have been criticized by Habermas who argues for an ideal speech situation, i.e. a situation of democratic communication with equal opportunities for social actors to communicate in an undistorted manner. This ideal situation is partially being realized by the advent of the internet. The paper describes how an internet‐based tool for collaborative authoring was conceptualized, developed and then deployed with Habermass Critical Social Theory as a guiding principle. The internet‐based electronic forum, known by its acronym GRASS (Group Report Authoring Support System), is a web tool supporting the production of concise group reports that give their readers an up‐to‐date and credible overview of the positions of various stakeholders on a particular issue. Together with people and procedures, it is a comprehensive socio‐technical information system that can play a role in resolving societal conflicts. A prototype of GRASS has been used by an environmental group as a new way in which to create a more equal exchange and comparison of ideas among various stakeholders in the debate on genetically modified food. With the widespread use of the internet, such a forum has the potential to become an emergent form of communication for widely dispersed social actors to conduct constructive debate and discussion. The barriers to such a mode of communication still remain – in the form of entrenched power structures, and limitations to human rationality and responsibility. However, we believe that the support provided by the comprehensive system of technological functionality as well as procedural checks and balances provided by GRASS may considerably reduce the impact of these obstacles. In this way, the ideal speech situation may be approximated more closely in reality.

Argumentation support: from technologies to tools

A plethora of technologies exist that are not necessarily tools. For technologies to become a tool, we contend, argumentation routines and design must coevolve.

DOGMA-MESS: a meaning evolution support system for interorganizational ontology engineering

In this paper, we explore the process of interorganizational ontology engineering. Scalable ontology engineering is hard to do in interorganizational settings where there are many pre-existing organizational ontologies and rapidly changing collaborative requirements. A complex socio-technical process of ontology alignment and meaning negotiation is therefore required. In particular, we are interested in how to increase the efficiency and relevance of this process using context dependencies between ontological elements. We describe the DOGMA-MESS methodology and system for scalable, community-grounded ontology engineering. We illustrate this methodology with examples taken from a case of interorganizational competency ontology evolution in the vocational training domain.

Patterns for the pragmatic web

The Semantic Web is a significant improvement of the original World Wide Web. It models shared meanings with ontologies, and uses these to provide many different kinds of web services. However, shared meaning is not enough. If the Semantic Web is to have an impact in the real world, with its multiple, changing, and imperfect sources of meaning, adequately modeling context is essential. Context of use is the focus of the Pragmatic Web and is all-important to deal with issues like information overload and relevance of information. Still, great confusion remains about how to model context and which role it should play in the Pragmatic Web. We propose an approach to put ontologies in context by using pragmatic patterns in meaning negotiation processes, among other meaning evolution processes. It then becomes possible to better deal with partial, contradicting, and evolving ontologies. Such an approach can help address some of the complexities experienced in many current ontology engineering efforts.

Context dependency management in ontology engineering: a formal approach

A viable ontology engineering methodology requires supporting domain experts in gradually building and managing increasingly complex versions of ontological elements and their converging and diverging interrelationships. Contexts are necessary to formalise and reason about such a dynamic wealth of knowledge. However, context dependencies introduce many complexities. In this article, we introduce a formal framework for supporting context dependency management processes, based on the DOGMA framework and methodology for scalable ontology engineering. Key notions are a set of context dependency operators, which can be combined to manage complex context dependencies like articulation, application, specialisation, and revision dependencies. In turn, these dependencies can be used in context-driven ontology engineering processes tailored to the specific requirements of collaborative communities. This is illustrated by a real-world case of interorganisational competency ontology engineering.

Formalizing the evolution of virtual communities

Collaboration increasingly takes place in virtual communities using the Internet. These communities are socio-technical systems that tend to evolve strongly and become more complex over time. To ensure that the changes to these complex socio-technical systems are meaningful and acceptable to the community as a whole, the relevant members of the community need to be involved in their specification. The RENISYS method conceptualizes community specification processes as conversations for specification by relevant members. It supports this process in two steps. First, it uses formal composition norms to select the relevant community members who need to be involved in a particular conversation for specification. It then uses a formal model of conversations for specification to determine the acceptable conversational moves that the selected community members can make, as well as the status of their responsibilities and accomplishments at each point in time. By combining composition norms with conversations for specification, the specification processes can be precisely tailored to the specification support needs of the community.

Business negotiation support : Theory and practice

Business negotiation support systems (NSS) are slowly entering the market, although they lack a clear theoretical basis as of yet. Negotiation is a complicated process with many aspects that have only partially been described with the formal rigidity needed to build support systems. Most theories about negotiation are descriptive and not prescriptive, which, among other things, prevents their use as a basis for negotiation support systems. Complicating matters is that a negotiation process consists of several distinct stages, each with its own characteristics. Furthermore, there are many types of negotiations, depending on the domain. This suggests that we should not strive for one general negotiation support system, but for a set of domain-specific tools. To ground the development and application of these tools in different scenarios, we propose an integrated theoretical framework. After presenting an overview of existing negotiation support approaches, we construct a business negotiation support metamodel for NSS analysis. The metamodel is illustrated by analyzing the MeMo project, which concerns contract negotiations in small and medium enterprises in the European construction industry. The MeMo system is one of the first business NSS with an explicit international orientation.

Workflow analysis with communication norms

The language/action perspective (LAP) as orginally introduced by Winograd and Flores has inspired several tools and information system design methodologies. The goal of this article is to make the communication norms underlying various LAP workflow loop models (DEMO, ActionWorkflow) explicit and to contrast them with the auditing norms of internal control. It appears that the communicative action paradigm embedded in DEMO and the customer satisfaction orientation of ActionWorkflow lead to norms which resemble the ones required by internal control, but there are some important differences. For that reason, we propose an extended workflow loop model that distinguishes between customer relations and agency relations. Whereas current LAP approaches do not take agency relations explicitly into account, the extended workflow loop model allows us to analyze the effects of delegation on communicative processes. A framework is offered for the normative analysis of workflows based on a number of formalized communication norms.