The HCOME-3O Framework for Supporting the Collaborative Engineering of Evolving Ontologies

Abstract. Nowadays it is widely accepted that ontologies, the key technology for the realization of the Semantic Web, are artefacts that are collaboratively and iteratively developed/evolved, shared, evaluated and discussed within communities of knowledge workers. To enhance the potential of ontologies to be collaboratively engineered and be consistently evolved within and between different communities, they must be escorted with rich meta-information describing the conceptualisations they realize, implementation decisions, the rationale for their evolution, as well as the evolution itself. To support the collaborative engineering of ontologies within and across different communities, this paper proposes a framework of (meta-)ontologies for capturing the metainformation that is necessary for interlinking, sharing, and combining knowledge among the parties involved in such a process. The framework is being embedded in the HCOME ontology engineering methodology, and can be applied to the design and implementation of ontology engineering tools towards advancing their interoperability.