Ontology construction and its applications in local research communities

Ontological engineering has been widely used for diverse purposes in different communities and a number of approaches have been reported for developing ontologies; however, few works address issues of specific ontology construction for local communities, especially when taking into account the specificity of academic knowledge creation. This Chapter summarizes efforts done in two cooperating communities in Japan and in Poland, including attempts to clarify the concept and the field of knowledge science, to create an ontology characterizing a research program in this field, then to apply related results in another field - contemporary telecommunications. The distinctive approach to ontology creation is based on a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches with the purpose of combining explicit knowledge with tacit, intuitive and experiential knowledge for constructing an ontology. Other possible views on constructing ontology are also presented and discussed; lessons from an ongoing application of this approach to a local research community working on contemporary telecommunication issues in Poland are also discussed. The combination of explicit and tacit, intuitive and experiential knowledge has led to a development of a software system named adaptive hermeneutic agent (AHA), a toolkit for documents gathering, keywords extracting, keywords clustering, and ontology visualization